Quick answer. Most intercepted passes are decided before the ball leaves the stick. The three usual causes are timing, speed and choice. The look came too early or too late, so the picture had already changed. The first touch was slow or too close to the feet, so the pass that was on when the player received it had closed by the time they were ready to play it. Or the player played the pass they had planned rather than the one that was actually there. Fix release speed and the timing of the scan before you rebuild anybody’s technique. And remember that the modern game is dominated by the push and the sweep, so a defence that reads flat, predictable passing is reading you correctly.
That is the short version. Here is how the coaches on The Hockey Site would work through it with you.
The window is about a second, so treat passing as a timing skill. In No overload? Create it! Play a wall pass!, Javi Telechea makes the point that the passer’s job starts before the pass: fix the defender first, commit them, and only then release. The window in which the pass is on lasts about a second. A player who carries for half a second too long is not passing badly, they are passing late, and those two problems have completely different fixes.
A slow first touch closes the pass you wanted. This is the sharpest idea on the subject anywhere on the site. In Boosting Field Hockey IQ, Robert Noall puts it like this: “You can decide what you want to do, but if your technique isn’t at the level, it takes too long, and the door is closed.” Slow feet or a narrow stance on reception does not only cost a touch. It removes options that existed a moment earlier. When you see a player make the safe backward pass, check whether they chose it or whether it was the only one left by the time they were ready.
Get the ball past the feet. Tsoanelo Pholo works to a simple rule in Receive to eliminate: the first touch must go past your feet. She sets a cone a stride ahead and the repetition does not count unless the ball gets beyond it. She is equally direct about movement, saying it is “really difficult to eliminate with a receive when you are static”. The tiny adjusting steps just before the ball arrives are what let a player point their hips and stick where they actually want to play.
Do not marry the pre-scan. Noall separates two things most coaches train as one: the scanning that happens while the ball is travelling, and the decision making that starts the moment it arrives. The players who stand out are the ones willing and technically able to abandon the pass they had planned when the picture changes late. If your players are getting picked off on the pass they clearly decided on three seconds earlier, that is what you are looking at.
Scan timing beats scan frequency. In Eyes Up, Tin Matkovic describes scanning as “mapping and puzzling”, where every look unlocks another part of the pitch. His warning is that a scan taken too early is wasted, because the map is out of date by the time the ball arrives. Counting scans with a clicker tells you how often a player looks. It tells you nothing about whether the look changed anything, and that is the part worth coaching.
Give the scan a job. Matkovic wants players scanning with a purpose, to manipulate a defender, to fake one way and go the other, or to spot a two against one somewhere else on the pitch. The common failure he names is players who scan and then take no action off it, which looks like good habits and produces nothing.
Read what the receiver is offering you. Siegfried Aikman’s way of describing reception is useful to the passer as much as the receiver. A player receiving open, with feet and face towards the opponent’s goal, can always go forward. Semi-open, body to the sideline, gives them a 180 degree view. Closed means they are under pressure and resetting. If you are passing to a closed receiver as though they were open, the interception is yours, not theirs.
Talk when the receiver has not looked. Matkovic’s point here is easy to build into a session. Under sudden pressure the passer often has the better overview, so the passer should be the one calling. Design the help chain deliberately rather than hoping it emerges.
Vary the pass, because the opposition is drilled against the obvious one. Fede Tanuscio makes this the whole argument of Rediscovering the Hit Pass: because almost everything is now a push or a sweep, defences are drilled against flat, two-dimensional passing. His case for the upright hit is not nostalgia, it is that a pass which skips a line is a pass nobody has been trained to intercept. Worth a thought if your side is being read.
Praise the decision, not the outcome. Noall is firm on this and it is the cheapest change on the list. A player whose good pass gets intercepted by a fine defensive read has not made a mistake. If you coach the outcome, you will train the ambition out of them within a season, and they will start choosing the backward pass on purpose.
None of this is a drill you can run tomorrow and be finished with. What these coaches give you is a way of watching the moment, so that the next time a pass is intercepted you can tell whether it was the timing, the touch, the choice or the look that failed. Watch the sessions in full, take what fits your players, and work it out with them.
Go more in depth here
Read next: Scan-to-First-Touch Under Pressure, Start with their hands, Winning the Second Pass.
More coaching questions: How do I coach a soft first touch in field hockey?, How do I coach the hit so players get power without lifting or fouling?, How do I get my team building out from the back without turning it over?, How do we beat a press in field hockey, especially off free hits and 16s?. All of them are in Field Hockey Coaching Questions.
The experts mentioned in this article
Robert NoallEnglish coach, active in the Dutch leagues.
Tin MatkovicCoach from Croatia, currently coaching in Germany.
Siegfried AikmanDutch international coach and Chair of the FIH Education Committee.
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