Building on the recent crowning of the 2002 Boys team as Ontario Champions, AG London embarked on an ambitious trip to Europe. Our boys departed for England and Belgium in March to play ‘actual’ professional soccer academies affiliated with ‘actual’ professional clubs.
Our goals included exposing young, elite Ontario soccer players to the realities of professional soccer academies, providing them with an opportunity to play against top talent to determine where they stand compared to more developed soccer nations, and introducing them to the prospects of potentially playing in Europe one day if they desire.
Our trip started in London, England, where the boys played Reading, Fulham, Watford, Leyton Orient and Tottenham in a whirlwind of friendly training scrimmage matches. The result was some surprising success against these clubs.
It took our boys a little while to make the adjustments. For instance, the referees let much more go, the players were bigger, and the games had significantly more body contact.
Technically, though, our boys were equal to or better than the players they faced. We learned that we had to step up the physicality of our game, and the boys did just that. We expect that their play back in Ontario will be seen as much tougher. We left England bruised, but confident and much improved.
The second phase of our operation took us to Belgium, where our head coach, Garrincha, played professionally. He played and coached there, and he maintains many great contacts with professional clubs and academies in Belgium.
Although technically our boys could compete against most of the teams, we were quite far behind our Belgium opponents in game intelligence and transitional play.
The beauty of the trip is that we started strong and got tougher, but then realized that soccer is much more than just being physical. The Belgium players were exceptional. We left Belgium after having played FC Brugge, Top Sport Academy (a collection of academy first team players), and Waregem Academy.
The experience was transformative for our players, as it opened their eyes to an inspiring approach to soccer. We knew we had established the foundations of truly amazing soccer, but the Belgium experience instructed us as to what we need to focus on to take our game to the next level. Speed of play, anticipation and transition are facets of our game that need to be addressed in order to compete internationally.
Our intention is to build on our lessons learned and ensure that our training curriculum exploits our strengths and weaknesses so that we can continue to build complete footballers able to play at the highest level.
– Submitted by Phillip Millar
