Does your practice look like the game?

Practice should look like the game, and if it doesn't then you might have some issues come game day. But in order to practice the techniques and tactics you could face in a game, you first need to analyze the game.

If you were to run a shooting drill, what would it look like? A 2v1, or 3v2 perhaps?

The table below comes from an analysis of the 2021 men’s European Championship A Division. For every circle entry in the tournament I recorded the number of offensive and defensive players in the circle after 2 seconds.

We see that by far the most frequent situation was an underload; a situation where the attacking team had fewer players in the circle than the defense. Specifically, the most common numerical situation was 4 attackers and 6 defenders - this occurred for 10% of all circle entries.

Whilst we can’t assume that this finding is representative of all levels of hockey, would this accurately reflect the types of situations that you most commonly practice?

Cover picture by Israel Palacio: https://www.instagram.com/israelpalacio/?hl=en