Alright lads, I’ve had a few of the fresh asking about how to play defence. The very basics can be summed up in three words: footwork, positioning and communication, probably one of the most overused clichés ever, but for good reason, if you get these three aspects of the game correct you’re well on the way to becoming a great defender.

Lets start with footwork, it’s the easiest part of defence to practice since you can do a lot of work for it on your own or in small groups, you don’t need to be the fastest guy on the pitch to play D, however you do need to have good acceleration, awareness and be able to change direction quickly to keep track of your attacker. It’s easy enough to improve your footwork by jumping rope, working on the legs in the gym and just getting a (padded-up) mate to dodge on you, you can always do it without pads if your not using too much contact or if your mate’s hard. When on the pitch, try to never cross your feet when marking a man, instead shuffle from side to side always facing your man (exactly as we do in one of our fetching warm up drills) and if he steps past you drop step rather than crossing your feet or turning your back towards him.

Positioning is more difficult, the best way to hone the skill is to get as much practice in a game situation as possible as it isn’t always black and white, but here’s a few tips to get you started:

Finally communication, the thing that turns a good collection of defenders into a great D unit, a good D is constantly talking to each other and there’s nothing better than trusting your defence to call picks, slides etc., it leaves you free to concentrate on your man (when he has the ball)

The main calls that you should make on D are:

These are the only basic calls that you need to know to run an effective defence and these calls don’t really vary from team to team, the finer details are something that you will learn from playing with a certain group of players and by (wait for it) communicating with each other both during and outside of play. Each team tends to have its own defensive philosophy, here at Warwick, at least in the firsts, we tend to play a fairly compact defence, letting the opposition take the long shots fairly unopposed. In close we are a very quick sliding team, based on the theory that it is better to slide too early than too late, so if you every catch yourself thinking “should I be sliding?” chances are you should be halfway there already.

The last aspect of D is what to do when, as will inevitably happen, you end up a man down. The team is then forced to play a zone defence (as opposed to the man-marking defence normally used)

This system is called the die defence, obviously, each man marks space and moves around accordingly in that space depending where the ball is. If someone needs to slide it should come from the corners of the square, for example if the attack work the top left until a man is free then the defender on the bottom left should slide to cover, then the defender on the bottom right should slide to cover the bottom left and so on until all the defenders on the outside should have moved one position around the outside. The main priority for the middle defender is to mark the creaseman and he should only slide if there is no other option.

Brilliant, that’s about all you need to know to get you started on D, this is only the tip of the iceberg but remember all that is written here and you should be fine. Notice how I have not included any stick checks, 90-95% of the checks you do will be body checks, there’s nothing worse than watching a middie do some mincy slash as an attacker runs past them. We’ve got 6 foot poles, you have not, stick to the bodies. If you really want to know the most important stick checks are poke, lift and slap, in that order. Now you know them, don’t use them, unless you decide to play long pole, in which case you’re special, well done. Oh I feel like I didn’t reiterate myself quite enough: middies, don’t stick check.