Enrich argues that packing the circle is not intrinsically good, just a habit that spread after Australia in 2014 and Argentina at the Olympics started throwing balls in at five or six attackers. Keep a single striker in there and the free man must pick a side, opening space for a well-timed lead. An open circle also leaves room for midfielders arriving as a second wave, accelerations he finds hard to cover. Watch the full masterclass: Tactical dilemmas.
Andreu opens with the Rosenthal and Jacobson experiment: students labelled top performers outscored the rest a year later, even though the groups were picked at random. He pulls out the four teacher behaviours behind it, a warmer climate, more and deeper content, more chances to respond, and constructive feedback, and names the reverse, the Golem effect. His closing dilemma: how far can you shape players without overriding their free will? Watch the full masterclass: The Pygmalion effect.
High expectations can backfire, Andreu argues here. Telling players anything is possible breeds frustration when it is not, so he treats expectations as agreements built through constant conversation across the season, not targets fixed on day one. Ric adds that in fourteen years with Australia’s national teams he never met a player who knew how good they could be, so the coach’s job is to keep lifting the bar. Watch the full masterclass: The Pygmalion effect.
Player numbers are a design decision, Enrich explains: an even 4v4, a permanent overload such as 5v4, or 4v4 plus a joker each shape the game differently. Jokers themselves can be constrained, supporting possession only, helping the defensive transition until the team completes three passes or leaves a zone, or being fixed in particular areas. The variations, he says, are close to infinite. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
Hockey is complex, variable and unpredictable, and Enrich’s argument is that you cannot expect to play a complex sport well if you train it under simplified conditions. Small sided games respect that internal logic: no situation ever repeats exactly, and the same game played a month apart produces different behaviours and results. That, he says, is precisely why they work. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
What Enrich wants from training is autonomous players, not robots: independent agents with a wide set of resources who can solve whatever the game presents. Teach mechanisms and pre-designed movement patterns and you create a dependent team that cannot adapt in real time; teach principles, tendencies of decision making like playing to the left foot, and players coordinate and self-organise without a central agent managing them. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
Constraints are the coach’s levers, and Enrich works through them: field shape and zones, densities, playing time and rhythm, scoring systems, technical and tactical rules, goal placement, even the umpire and the players’ senses. His favourite paradox concerns width: make the pitch wide and flat and players run straight at goal, but make it narrow and they naturally start using the full width to progress. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
How many small sided games in a two hour session, and how long should each one last? Enrich’s answer: as many as you can, with length set by intensity. An 8v8 can run 12 minutes, a 4v4 no more than 4, often played in two-minute sets with equal rest. Past 15 to 20 minutes on one game, players switch off. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
A typical Enrich session starts with a playful small sided warm up, sometimes not even hockey, then splits the squad across two or three micro games, each focused on one principle or dimension, with every player rotating through all of them. From there the session builds from micro to macro, ending around 6v6 or 5v5, with one day a week reserved for a big 8v8. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
Goalkeepers are the forgotten players in training design, Enrich says, and he offers fixes. If a game gives them few actions, hand them a separate attentional focus such as organising the defence. Better still, involve them: play inside the circle with two goals, let a goalie join the other team’s attack with their feet, or put them into big possession games so they learn to read situations. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
Asked for his attacking principles, Enrich gives vertical progression as a major principle, with give and go, overlap and third man accelerations as sub-principles beneath it. But he insists the specific list matters less than the structure: build your own principles and your own terminology, organise them across the phases and from macro to micro, and periodise them across the season. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.
His advice for winning over sceptical colleagues is practical: run small sided games for a week, then ask the players what they prefer, because they will always choose to play. Beyond that, point doubters to the research, since the approach rests on published study rather than personal taste, and Enrich expects the shift to happen across the sport anyway. Watch the full masterclass: Small Sided Games.