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.

What is the Indian dribble in field hockey?

The Indian dribble is a ball-carrying technique where the player rotates the stick with the left hand to move the ball from the open side to the reverse and back while running. Done well it keeps the ball out in front and lets the player run with the head up, protecting the ball and disturbing a defender's feet. As covered in Simon Letchford's Why the left hand matters masterclass on The Hockey Site, the left hand is the part that does the steering.

How do I teach the left-hand rotation for the Indian dribble?

Start with the grip. Set a relaxed left hand at the top of the stick and teach it to rotate the stick face from open to reverse, rather than flicking the wrists. The Essential Grip Skills masterclass with Adam Falla and Ross Gilham-Jones stresses getting the hands into the right position first, and bringing the right hand up the stick when carrying so the ball rides further out and the vision opens up. Groove the rotation slowly before adding pace or a defender.

At what age should players learn the Indian dribble?

You can introduce the foundations early. The Hockey Site article Start with their hands notes that technical habits wire in fastest when players are young, so a clean left-hand action taught early saves years of un-teaching later. Keep it playful, let young players feel success before piling on pressure, and build the correct habit alongside any existing one rather than attacking the fault head on.

elimination skills Archives

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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How do I teach the Indian dribble properly in field hockey?

Quick answer. Build the Indian dribble from the grip up. Set a relaxed left hand at the top of the stick to do the steering, then teach that hand to rotate the stick so the ball travels from open side to reverse and back while the player runs. Keep the ball out in front of the feet so the head stays up, start slow to groove the action, and only then add pace, a defender and a reason to move the ball at all. It is a controlled carry, not a wristy party trick.

That surface answer will get a young player waggling the ball from side to side by the end of a session, but the coaches on The Hockey Site would tell you not to stop there. A dribble that only exists on the spot, with the head down and no purpose, is a habit you will spend years un-teaching.

Begin with the grip, not the ball. Before a player moves the ball anywhere, the hands have to be right, and the Essential Grip Skills masterclass makes that the whole starting point. As Adam Falla puts it there, if we can get the hands into the right position for the different techniques then we are off to a really good start in creating good hockey fundamentals. For the Indian dribble that means a relaxed left hand at the top of the stick doing the steering, with the right hand lower and lighter. Rush past this and you are teaching a flick on top of a broken foundation.

The left hand is the engine of the movement. The side to side action is not the wrists flapping, it is the left hand rotating the stick so the face turns from open to reverse and back. Simon Letchford gives his whole Why the left hand matters session to exactly this, arguing that if we grip the stick correctly in our left hand then we can execute all of our skills far better and more easily than if we hold it the wrong way. He also calls it one of the most under-coached parts of the game, something top players do on instinct while everyone else quietly misses it. Worth remembering the next time a player’s dribble looks stiff and forced.

Let the ball live in front of the feet. Young players keep the ball close because close feels safe, but close also means blind. Letchford’s link is a good one to pass on: the further away we get the ball from our feet, the easier our vision becomes. In the same grip masterclass, Ross Gilham-Jones supplies the mechanical fix, that when you are ball carrying you bring the right hand up the stick so you can extend your arms and have the ball further out, which increases your vision and your gameplay significantly. A proper Indian dribble is played out where the player can see it, not tucked under the nose.

Treat it as a carry, not a trick. Andrew Wilson argues in Running with the ball that running with the ball is a genuine and fundamental part of hockey, not a last resort when the pass is missing. But he is just as clear that the aim is not raw speed. With a naturally quick player he says he would first teach her to slow down, because knowing how and when to use your speed becomes the real superpower. His warning lands here too: we do not want players who are machines, we want players who can read in split seconds. An Indian dribble drilled at one relentless tempo simply builds a faster machine.

Give every touch a job. The point of moving the ball across the body is to hold a defender, disturb their feet and open a passing or running line, not to decorate a jog up the pitch. Wilson shows how running with the ball wins the congested moments around the circle, where a flat pass would just be intercepted and a player has to carry to create the danger. Tsoanelo Pholo ties the footwork to it in his Receive to eliminate masterclass, insisting on tiny adjusting steps and a first touch that goes past the feet, so the player is already travelling beyond the defender rather than dribbling on the spot.

Remember where the dribble starts. In a match the Indian dribble rarely begins from a still ball, it flows out of a receive. Siegfried Aikman is blunt in his Receiving skills session that stopping the ball barely happens in modern hockey, and that receiving is really about preparing your next action. If a player’s first touch already sets the ball out in front and slightly across the body, the dribble is half done before the defender even arrives, and your technical drill starts to look like the game.

Groove it early and let them feel it work. The Hockey Site’s article Start with their hands makes the case that habits, good or bad, wire in fastest when players are young, so a clean left-hand action now is the cheapest investment you will ever make. When something is already wrong, the gentle route is to build the correct habit beside the old one and keep reaching for it, rather than attacking the fault head on. Let players feel a small success before you pile on pressure, and prompt a fix with a short question instead of narrating every mistake, because the correction a player finds themselves is the one that sticks.

None of this replaces watching a coach do it and explain the why. If you want the detail behind the cues, the grip, the rotation of the left hand and the decision to carry rather than pass, the masterclasses below let you hear it straight from the coaches and work out what fits your own group.