Belgium’s coaching scene is fairly open, in McLeod’s experience. He points to the federation’s youth and coach programmes, speaks with club coaches after Sunday games about how their teams have gone, sketches diagrams with them, and sometimes asks clubs to try elements of the national side’s game where they fit. Tokyo material stays off limits, but general knowledge flows freely. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
McLeod argues tactics start almost as soon as children pick up a stick, from the moment one kid stands away from the swarm around the ball because he has already grasped space. From there he builds in stages, keeping four areas simple at every level: pressing, outlet, ways of attacking and defending, coached to each group’s skill and maturity. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Number counting is McLeod’s tool for young players stuck in corners. A 2v2 can progress, but a 1v3 means changing perspective and working the ball out, because the far side of the pitch will be open. He describes a simple coned game to train it: one point for going into the circle directly, two for getting the ball out and switching to the other side. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
A zonal base has run through every system McLeod has coached. He wants a set shape so that when his team wins the ball he knows exactly what structure the attack starts from, and he distrusts pure man to man because strikers can drag key defenders into harmless positions. The diamond, he notes, is a European shape with known weaknesses that he has still bought into. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Craig Fulton arrived with the Belgian staff already set, McLeod explains, and found his own place alongside two self-confessed control freaks. He started with some work on the strikers, grew close to the players through his personal skills, and then led a 14-man Beyond Tokyo squad as head coach on the Australia trip. Three head coaches makes for funny dynamics, but everyone finds their way. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Belgian hockey is closing on 55,000 players, up from around 10,000 a decade ago, and McLeod accepts the coaching base is chasing that growth. Overseas coaches currently fill the gap and lift the youth game, as he once did before ending up coaching players he had trained at eight or nine. Talented homegrown coaches, he believes, are nearly ready to take over the reins. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Drill construction, for McLeod, starts with recreating situations that actually occur in hockey rather than repeating the same picture with no advantage in it. For young players he builds in a short-lived head start, a 3v3 where the receiver has vision the whole way, and coaches the early look and connection before the pass. Defenders are then added progressively to create changeovers and 2v1s. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Legacy, the story of the All Blacks, is the one book McLeod names. The Red Lions borrow its language, presenting each new player’s shirt through an older player and talking about leaving the shirt in a better place, an idea now marked by the World Cup star above the Belgian badge. He also recommends Simon Sinek’s talks. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Players cover unfamiliar positions well only if the whole team is educated together, McLeod says. He runs unit meetings for strikers, midfielders and defenders, then a master meeting where each unit tells the others what it expects, so a centre midfielder pushed up as a striker already sits inside that matrix of communication. Width, depth and compactness remain the shared reference points. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Technically the final was very chess-like, in McLeod’s view: the Netherlands managed Belgium’s threats well, Belgium did much the same in return, and neither goal saw many chances. He accepts the general public wanted goals, but stands by the quality, especially with his players handling a first World Cup final while the Dutch carried their whole country’s expectation. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
Game sense work in McLeod’s sessions starts with repeatables, situations that happen ten times across two games rather than once. His staff review them on video, where players connect quickly, then transfer them to the pitch as competitive games, such as ten handball situations against ten handball presses with rewards for both the attacking and defending sides. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.
If you want your bench to get stronger, roll your bench, McLeod says. He once preset a subbing sheet that gave marquee players productive minutes while timetabling squad players in for growing, guaranteed blocks, so everyone knew their game time and trained accordingly. One second-team player who came through that system now starts for Waterloo Ducks, one of Belgium’s better sides. Watch the full masterclass: AMA with Shane McLeod.