A.A. Naumov
Associate Professor, PhD A.A. Shakhov
Yelets State Ivan Bunin University, Yelets

Keywords: football, fall, self-protection, falling error, statistics, national footballers, elite footballers, training system optimization

Introduction

It is not unusual to see frequent falls of players in football matches, some of them resulting in severe injuries that may be of negative impact both on the match result and the sport career of the injured athlete. However, an analysis of the national research, regulatory, programmatic, educational and practical training guides, study reports and publications with concern to the long-term football training systems show that they pay surprisingly little if any attention to the fall-control skills that need to be developed in the players. It should be mentioned that some foreign specialists have reported some progress on this issue [1]. The football sport science and practice may obviously benefit from the vast experience of fall-control skills development systems and practices that exist in a few other sports, particularly the competitive wrestling ones. This study makes an attempt to analyze some statistics of falls in football matches of low-ranking national and elite foreign teams in the hope that the analysis may be helpful in expanding our theoretical knowledge base on the subject matter and may outline the ways to put together a fall-control education technology applicable in the national football training systems to improve the players’ self-protection-at-fall skills.

Methodology of the study. The study was basically designed to collect and analyze video-records of 15 Division III football matches of the 2014 Russian Cup of the Black Earth region Teams and 15 football matches of the 2014 World Cup.

Study results and discussion. Match video replay analysis produced the following statistical data. In the elite athletes’ group we fixed 1509 falls with at least one falling error made in 26% of these falls. In the low-ranking national players’ group we fixed 1193 falls with the falling error rate of 42%. Given in Table 1 hereunder are these and other data that are indicative of the fact that the elite football players fall more often in matches. It is the determined and uncompromising game manner of the elite players that may be one of explanations for this fact. Moreover, there is a clear trend for the falling errors going down with the growing skills of the players. It should be also mentioned that the high standard deviation in the count of falling errors made by the low-ranking national players may be indicative of a wide variability of their fitness in the fall-control aspect.

A distribution analysis of the fall reasons of the low-ranking national versus elite foreign players gives much the same picture: struggle for the ball was the reason for 38% and 33% of the falls, respectively; rule violations by the opponent triggered 17% and 19% of the falls, respectively; 11% and 15% of the falls were made by the goalkeepers catching the ball, respectively; 9% and 8% of the falls, respectively, were caused by the loss of balance when striking the ball; fight for the ball in high jumps caused falls in 6% and 6% of the cases, respectively; and other reasons for the falls accounted for 19% and 20% of the total count, respectively.

A fall direction analysis of the low-ranking national versus elite foreign players gives much the similar picture too: forward falls accounted for 46% and 46 % of the total fall count, respectively; backward falls occurred in 26% and 23% of the cases, respectively; side falls totaled 15% and 18% of the count, respectively; and the forward-and-side and backward-and-side falls accounted for 13% and 12% of the total falls, respectively. The elite players at the same time (see Table 2) were found to fall singnificantly more often in the forward and backward directions than the low-ranking national ones that is clearly explainable by their (elite players’) higher count of falls on the whole.

A landing statistics analysis of the elite foreign players versus the low-ranking national ones – fixing the body part the players landed on – gives the following distribution: landings on chest accounted for 33% and 26% of the total falls, respectively; landings on back were fixed in 25% and 23% of the cases, respectively; landings on some side of the body took place in 20% and 23% of the total falls, respectively; players landed on buttocks in 8% and 9%; on all fours in 6% and 7%; and on knees in 3% and 3% of the falls, respectively. Absolute rates of the landing point distribution per match (see Table 3) are indicative of the elite football players falling on the back and chest more often – that may be again explainable by their higher count of falls on the whole.

Furthermore, we have analyzed the falling errors of the elite foreign players versus the low-ranking national ones and obtained the following data: the players landed on straight hand(s)/ forearm(s) when falling in the backward or backward-and-side directions in 26% and 34% of the total falling error count, respectively; the players failed to mitigate the impact by hands when falling in the forward and forward-and-side directions in 19% and 27% of the total falling error count, respectively; no body-grouping attempts were made in 33% and 25% of the total falling error count, respectively; the players kneeled falling in the forward and forward-and-side directions in 12% and 8% of the total falling error cases; they misplaced their hand(s) rolling forward at fall in 3% and 2% of the total falling error cases; and misplaced their heads when falling backward in 4% and 2% of the total falling error cases, respectively. These data are apparently indicative of differences in the error structure of the elite foreign players versus the low-ranking national ones. Overall, analysis of the data given in Table 2 shows that the low-ranking national players more often make biomechanical falling errors landing on hands and failing to properly mitigate falls by hands.

Dominating in both of the groups of players were the following falling errors: failure to properly group the body when falling back with often landing on straight hand(s)/ forearm(s); failure to properly group the body when falling forward with the head being often misplaced (chin not tight to the chest); the players kneel when falling forward and/or fail to properly mitigate the impact by hands; the players fail to group the body and/or mitigate the impact by hands when making an overhead kick; and the goalkeeper fails to mitigate the impact by hands and group the body when catching the ball and falling on a side.

Conclusions

The study provides analysis of the falls of the low-ranking Division III national players in the Russian Cup matches versus the elite foreign players in the World Cup matches. The study gives analysis of the total rated falls and falling errors made by both of the categories of players in the matches and identifies the following trends: counts of falls in the football matches tend to grow with the growing skills of the players, whilst the falling errors tend to go down with the growing fall-control (and general football) skills; the reasons for the falls and distributions of landing points of the low-ranking national versus the elite foreign players were found basically identical; albeit the distributions of major falling errors made by the elite foreign players versus the low-ranking national ones were different. There are good reasons to conclude that the study data and findings may be beneficial for the long-term fall-control training component being designed within the frame of the football training systems to help develop good self-protection-at-fall skills in the players. 

Table 1. Fall statistics of low-ranking national players versus elite foreign ones

Table 3. Distribution of landing points by the body parts

Table 4. Falling error statistics of both group players

References

1. Helden Van De Toekomst. Ajax opleiding [electronic resource] / Van De Toekomst Helden. – Amsterdam: Armada Sports, 2007. – DVD.

Corresponding author: shakhov-art@yandex.ru

Abstract

As seen from studies of domestic scientific, regulatory materials, and teaching aids devoted to long-term training in football, the problem of purposeful development of self-protection skill at falls has been poorly studied.

Nowadays, football is one of the most traumatic sports. This is largely due to the large number of falls of players during football matches. However, to date in the practice of long-term training of domestic footballers little attention has been paid to the formation of self-protection skills at falls. At the same time foreign colleagues have certain developments.

There were identified trends in the specifics of falls of national players and world-class athletes relying on the method of video analysis of football matches of both of the types of athletes. There was shown a significant number of falls taking place during the match of both domestic and foreign football players. The number of falls increases with the growth of sport competency, while the number of permissible errors goes down. Reasons, direction of falls and body part on which the player lands, when falling are largely identical in these groups. At the same time, the ratio of major errors of foreign and domestic footballers is different.

The results can be used to develop a technology of forming self-spotting skills of domestic footballers during different falls.