Moving Up Your Keeper During The Last Minute

by David
(Texas, U.S)

As a coach you always want your team to win. To reach that goal you need to take right decisions during the whole game. One thing that I do not see often is coaches that use their keeper as a weapon during the last minute of the game. Even if the keeper won’t likely score a goal he will still force opponents to mark him which will give your other players a better scoring opportunity.

To give you a real world example I will tell you about an amazing game that was played 5 years ago. I was coaching an U16 team that was pretty talented. We were holding a no 2 position in the league and my players and I was satisfied with that. However, that day my team was facing the title holders. The game was pretty hard and it was obvious that my players were underdogs. However, they only had a 1-0 lead and when there was about 2 minutes left of the game my team was awarded with a corner kick.

I quickly shouted to my keeper to move up and he did that immediately without further discussion.
The following 60 seconds are actually unbelievable but my keeper managed to win the heading duel and scored 1-1 for us. Directly after that my team was awarded with another corner kick and this time the keeper flicked the ball with his head to another teammate who kicked the ball into the opponent’s goal.

So, even if the keeper’s main task is not to score goals he can still be very useful during the last minutes of the game. Of course, you are risking another goal but there is no difference in losing 1-0 or 2-0.