What counts as successfully eliminating a defender in field hockey?

Tsoanelo Pholo calls it getting beyond the advantage line: if you are in front of a defender and you get behind their hip line, that is an elimination. It gives players something measurable to aim at instead of a highlight-reel move, and it lets a coach award a point for every successful one on one in a game. Robert Noall adds the team version: you are not playing a one against one to beat an opponent, you are playing it to create an overload.

Why are my players fit but slow to turn?

Because conditioning and changing direction are different things. Wouter Blondeel separates high speed running, which is mostly straight-line, from explosive distance, which is accelerations and decelerations. Two other causes are common: club players rarely sprint at genuine full effort, and squads that always train on the same pitch size never get exposed to the turn. Matthew Eyles recommends varying small-sided game dimensions across the week for exactly this reason.

How do I train change of direction in field hockey?

Matthew Eyles gives it one focused slot a week, without stick and ball, so players can attack the turn properly. Train the stop as well as the turn, having players run to a point and halt dead, or halt on a command. Then progress from pre-planned to reactive, calling left or right as they arrive, and cover forwards, backwards and sideways. Mick Beunen attaches the turn to a decision by calling a number, a colour or a number of fingers.

Is deceleration a strength problem or a technique problem?

Wouter Blondeel puts technique first, then posture, then stability, and only then strength. His practical suggestion is to film players in slow motion coming from maximum speed to a stop and watch the torso and knees. Eccentric strength does matter, and weak eccentric strength limits change of direction as well as raising injury risk, but the first intervention is coaching the movement rather than going to the gym.

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Q: How do I coach players who can't beat a defender one on one?

Work in order: ball position, then acceleration, then the move, because most failed one on ones are a ball position problem rather than a skill problem. Robert Noall goes as far as saying that when the first two are right you often need no move at all, because the speed has already beaten the defender. Teach players to slow down before they speed up, since decelerating is what commits a defender, and make sure the elimination leads somewhere rather than ending in the same duel again.

Q: Do players have to dribble past someone to eliminate them?

No. Tin Matkovic describes five kinds of elimination: connection, speed, line-skipping, deception and passing. Elimination by connection is two players passing around an opponent, so nobody has to win a duel at all, and a change of pace alone can beat someone without any move.

How do I coach players who can’t beat a defender one on one?

Quick answer. Start by defining what beating a defender means, because most players are aiming at the wrong thing. Tsoanelo Pholo’s version is getting beyond the advantage line: if I am in front of you, do you get behind my hip line? Then work in order, because most failed one on ones are a ball-position problem rather than a skill problem. Robert Noall’s sequence is ball position first, acceleration second, the move last, and he goes as far as saying that when the first two are right you often need no move at all, because the speed has already beaten the defender. Teach players to slow down before they speed up, since decelerating is what commits a defender. And treat the elimination as the start of something, not the end of it. A player who beats their opponent and then runs back into them has not gained anything.

That is the short version. Here is how the coaches on The Hockey Site would build it with you.

Change what the one on one is for. In How to train 1v1 in game situations, Robert Noall reframes the whole thing: “you’re not playing one against one to beat an opponent. You’re playing one against one to create an overload.” That takes the duel out of the world of tricks and puts it back into team play, and it gives you something to look for in a session other than whether it looked good.

Then give them a definition they can measure. In How to train 1v1 elimination, Tsoanelo Pholo puts it like this: “I call it getting beyond the advantage line, which is, if you’re in front of me, if I look at your hip line, do I get to get behind you? That for me is an elimination.” It sounds like a technicality and it changes what players chase. They stop hunting the highlight-reel move and start aiming at something they can see themselves achieve, and you can count it.

Slow to attract, fast to eliminate. That is Pholo’s phrase and it is the most useful sentence on this page. Her argument is that everyone assumes elimination is about acceleration and being quick, and that this is backwards: “if we are not slow to attract the defender to want to try win the ball, you’re going to be running at one pace and the defender will not come into the zone that you want them to come into”. The deception is in the slowing down. “The acceleration can only come if you’ve slowed down enough for the defender.” Noall describes the same move from the other side, a player who deliberately slows his run so the defender slows with him, and only then reaccelerates. Andrew Wilson arrives at the same place from the other direction in Running with the ball, saying of a naturally quick player: “I would first teach her to slow down because knowing how to use your speed and when to use your speed will be her superpower.”

Fix the ball position before you teach a single move. Noall breaks the one on one into three phases and insists on the order: ball position, then acceleration, then elimination. He puts the ball at roughly two o’clock, ahead of the feet rather than beside them, because from there a player can attack the space and pass into most of the pitch. With the ball at three or four o’clock they can only pass into a narrow slice of it. He is relaxed about the number itself, saying it can be one o’clock or quarter past three as long as the players know what you mean. Pholo prefers one o’clock, and is clear it is a personal preference: from there, she says, “I can pass behind, I can pass left, I can pass right, I can pass forward.” She is equally clear that three o’clock and even five o’clock are carry positions too. The point is not the number on the clock. It is that the ball is somewhere the player can do more than one thing from. If your players keep losing the duel, check where the ball is before you check what they tried to do with it.

A change of speed is itself an elimination. Noall makes this point and it takes the pressure off players who think they need a trick. His version is blunt: if the ball position and the acceleration are right, “you don’t need to eliminate a player because you’ve already eliminated them due to the speed you are traveling”. One hand on the stick during the acceleration lets them run properly rather than shuffling, and he thinks that one-handed skill is undertrained.

There is more than one way to beat someone. Tin Matkovic lists five in Elimination has many layers: connection, speed, line-skipping, deception and passing. The player who dribbles past everybody exists, he says, but it does not happen that often. Elimination by connection is two players passing around an opponent, so nobody has to win a duel at all. Elimination by speed, in his words, is asking a player “to run outside of the duel and accelerate” rather than back into it. If you have a squad who cannot beat anyone one on one, some of them may not need to.

Eliminate, then accelerate. Russell Coates names the most common wasted elimination in How to Train 3D Elimination Skills: “they’ll have a nice little lift and then they’ll continue to try and go through the defender again”. His cue is to attack space instead of the man, and to lift and then accelerate into the space the lift has just made. Beating someone and then giving them a second chance to tackle you is worse than not beating them at all, because now your team’s shape has moved on without you.

3D belongs in tight space, not everywhere. Coates has the clearest reasoning on why lifting the ball works: the shave, the jab and the block tackle all assume the ball is travelling along the ground. Take it off the deck and the defender’s standard kit stops working. But he is equally clear on when not to: at pace with space in front of you there is no need for it, and a dummy or a drag will do, because lifting the ball is riskier and harder and leaves you regaining control of a bouncing ball. Design games with constrained space rather than telling players to use 3D.

Attack the left foot, but not too close. Fede Tanuscio coaches players to carry at the defender’s left foot deliberately and to run diagonal lines rather than straight at them, since running straight at a defender is an invitation to be intercepted. His purpose is as much about opening up the pass to the left foot as about beating anyone. Matkovic agrees with the cue and adds the caveat coaches skip: go too close to the opponent’s swing and they will simply wipe the ball away. The left foot is a target, not a destination.

Teach them when not to. Noall’s visual cue is a tunnel of open space between the player and the goal with no defender standing in it. If a player can see that tunnel, he wants them to go, every single time. Matkovic supplies the other half, and it is blunt: “I think the magic is off ball work.” A whole team that can only beat one defender out of three kills the space and kills the tempo, and he does not want a side of ten individuals, because the defender who tries to dribble past five players and loses it has handed you the counter-attack.

How the coaches actually train it. Noall has two rules here and they are worth keeping apart. Use gates rather than cones, because a line of cones makes a player run, stop, perform an action and go again, and “in a match, it does not how it happens”. Separately, do not train isolated one on ones at all, because “an isolated one against one never happens in hockey” — there is always a teammate and always a second defender. Inside the gates he refuses to prescribe the move: “I don’t care how you do it, get through the gates as quick as possible.” Coates runs a battle ladder where the winner stays on as the attacker and the player who loses the ball has to defend, on the grounds that “there’s one thing that attackers don’t like and that’s defending”. Pholo builds a whole session on the same instinct. She starts with players simply moving the ball around over half a pitch, “seven, eight minutes, no coaching at this stage”, after a conversation about what eliminating actually means to them. Then paired duels in a space of roughly four by six metres with no goals, because “it’s not about finishing, this is just about having a duel between the attacker and the defender”. Then, when it goes into a game, the team gets a point or a goal for every successful one on one, which turns the defending side’s job into a challenge rather than a punishment.

Then coach your own behaviour. Noall’s version is a rule for the coach rather than a mindset for the player: “never tell someone they did it wrong if they make a mistake”. Wilson lands in the same place: “if they’re making mistakes, they’re learning… your style of coach has everything to do with their confidence of those players”. A player who has been told off for losing the ball will not try to beat anybody next week, and you will have solved the wrong problem.

None of this is a session you run once. What these coaches give you is a way of seeing the duel, so you can tell whether the ball was in the wrong place, the speed never changed, the move came too early or the player simply had no reason to believe it would work. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits your players, and let them find their own version of it.

Go more in depth here

Tsoanelo Pholo

How to train 1v1 elimination

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Robert Noall

How to train 1v1 in game situations

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Tin Matkovic

Elimination has many layers

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More coaching questions: How do I teach the Indian dribble properly in field hockey?, How do I coach a soft first touch in field hockey?, How do I stop my defenders diving in and giving away free hits?, My players are fit but slow to turn. How do I train change of direction?. All of them are in Field Hockey Coaching Questions.

The experts mentioned in this article

Tsoanelo PholoFormer South African international player and coach in Hong Kong.

Robert NoallEnglish coach, active in the Dutch leagues.

Tin MatkovicCoach from Croatia, currently coaching in Germany.

Russell CoatesCoach in The Netherlands. Founder of Hockey Platform.

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My players are fit but slow to turn. How do I train change of direction?

Quick answer. Fit but slow to turn usually means they have never actually trained turning. Conditioning builds the engine, and changing direction is a separate skill with its own technique, most of which lives in the deceleration nobody coaches. Give it one deliberate slot a week, without stick and ball so there is nothing to hide behind, and progress it from planned to reactive so the player is reading rather than rehearsing. Then look at your pitch sizes, because a squad that only plays small-sided games never sprints and a squad that only plays big never has to stop.

That is the short version. Here is how these coaches take it apart.

Turning is not the running half of fitness. Wouter Blondeel separates the two cleanly in Mastering Physical KPIs: “high speed running is the running on a high intensity, mostly in a straight line. The explosive distance has to do with accelerations and decelerations. So more has to do with change of directions.” A player can be excellent at one and poor at the other, and a beep test will not tell you which.

Deceleration is a technique problem before it is a strength problem. Blondeel is explicit about the order: “for me, deceleration has all to do with, first of all, technical base. Second of all, of course, it has to do with posture, and posture has to do with stability.” Which means the first intervention is not the gym.

So film it, and coach it like a skill. His suggestion costs nothing and is the most practical thing on this page: “try to take some slow mo videos, try to work on the technique, try to see, okay, what is this guy doing if he’s going from his maximum speed to a slow speed? And how does he change direction? What is going on with his torso? What is going on with his knees?”

Give it a slot, and take the stick away. Matthew Eyles is the clearest voice on the dose, in Injury Reduction Training Methods: “once a week, what does that look like? Well, just a focused moment in training, whether it’s a warm up or whatever, where we’re really forcing the athletes to change direction hard. And this has to be done progressively, but giving them that moment without stick and ball, take that away, and allow them to really attack a change of direction, expose them to those sorts of forces over time will build up that robustness.”

Train the stop, not just the turn. Eyles thinks this is the commonly missed half, and he ties it to injuries as well as speed: “the deceleration component, I think that is something that we often overlook. If you look at injuries particularly around the knee, if you want to talk about quad injuries and things like that, a lot of them happen around that deceleration moment. So training that, having your athlete run to a point and stop dead, or stop dead on a command, even better, will help.”

Then make it reactive, because a match never tells you in advance. His progression is deliberately unglamorous: “progress it from maybe non-reactive. So, okay, athlete A, you’re going to run from this cone, stop, and when I say go again you’re going to shuffle here and accelerate out. To a bit more reactive where you’re going to run to this cone, and I’m going to tell you left or right, and then you’re going to go left or right and accelerate out. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Keep it simple, but just think about it and progress it.” And it should cover every direction a game asks for: “forwards, backwards, sideways shuffling, sideways running and looking over your shoulder, running backwards to turning and accelerating out.”

Reason one your fit players are slow: they never actually sprint. Blondeel names this directly and it is uncomfortable: “most of all, I’m trying to focus the guys towards 100% sprinting. And that’s something they don’t tend to do often. In clubs, they don’t tend to do it often.” Eyles says the same thing from the other side: “fast running is not sprinting. There has to be intent there. So seeing someone run across the field at 80% is probably not enough.”

Reason two: your pitch sizes never change. This is the structural one, and it is free to fix. Eyles: “we don’t see enough variation in the sizes of the fields for your small sided games. If for whatever tactical reason you do need to only play on small fields, well, then make sure you’re getting your sprinting in somewhere else. If you’re only playing on big fields, make sure you’re getting your change of direction, your agility exposure in somewhere else as well.” Xavi Haro makes the same point as a design lever rather than a warning: “when the pitch is smaller, the amount of accelerations or decelerations will be higher. And when the pitch is longer, the amount of accelerations and decelerations will be lower. But in the amount of sprints, when the pitch is big, we will have a lot of sprints.” Your pitch dimensions are a dial. Most coaches leave it in one position all season.

Attach the turn to a decision. Mick Beunen refuses to run agility as a separate block in Physically game ready: “we mostly integrate our physical skills in the hockey, whether it’s aerobic side and anaerobic side and agility part. It’s all integrated in the hockey session.” The mechanism is simple enough to steal tomorrow: “you do agility work, you call out a number and that number makes that he has to choose one side or another. The same you can do with showing them with your fingers or with your colour.” A turn the player chose is a different skill from a turn they rehearsed.

Make it a theme for the week, not a drill. Andreu Enrich puts it best, in a masterclass on training design: “one day is focused on change of direction. So the coach says, okay, on the first training day of the week, changes of direction is the thing that we want to promote in your hockey drills, in your hockey small sided games, in everything you do. So the coaches can design tasks where there’s a high density of players in a small pitch so there’s a lot of acceleration, deceleration and change of direction.” That reframes the whole problem. You are not adding a ladder to the warm-up, you are choosing what the session is about.

The strength underneath it. Blondeel ties the two ends together: “from the strength point is the deceleration, eccentric. So it means that if a guy doesn’t have good eccentric strength, it will have disadvantages towards injuries, but also towards his change of direction.” He starts at the ankles, on the grounds that “there it starts, you have contact with the ground”. Eyles describes what the cut actually asks for: “when you plant your foot to cut and change direction, there’s a big eccentric and isometric moment there.”

The dose, in one line. Eyles: “one time a week sprinting, one time a week agility. Just make sure you’re nice and warm.”

None of this needs equipment you do not have. What these coaches give you is a way of seeing the turn, so you can tell whether your player is slow because of the engine, the technique, the strength, or because nothing in your week has ever asked them to stop hard and go the other way. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits, and change your pitch sizes.