Carlos Retegui on players who see three plays ahead

There is a moment in this AMA where Carlos Retegui, sitting on an exercise bike at home with a rowing machine next to him, quietly sorts hockey players into three groups.

He names Santi Freixa as the third kind. A player who already knew, on the first pass, where the ball was going to end up two passes later and which part of the pitch it was going to hurt you from.

That answer is the key to the whole hour, and not only because it is a nice line. It tells you where his coaching attention sits. Not on shapes drawn on a whiteboard first, but on what players see, when they see it, and whether they can act on it. And it quietly explains something else he says later, which sounds sentimental until you connect the two: he keeps selecting players other coaches have already written off.

Bernardo Fernandes hosted this one in Spanish during the early weeks of the 2020 lockdown, with questions coming from coaches watching live. One of them was mine, about where defensive systems were heading, so consider that declared.

Quotes have been translated from the original Spanish.

Where to go deeper. Some links we added from relevant earlier and later masterclasses:

The first question from the floor asked whether he measures peripheral vision in his players. His answer reframes it before answering it.

"That is perceptual," he says, and then describes what he actually wants. "If the ball is coming from the right side and I am looking at where the ball is coming from, we have to try to make sure that when my team-mate is making the technical action of the pass, before that, you do that pre-scan and that peripheral vision, so you can see which game situation to decide on before the ball reaches the player. So it is looking before receiving. That looking before receiving is absolutely essential, because it is pre-scanning the decision of the play I am going to execute."

Read the order in that sentence. The scan is not a habit performed for the coach's benefit. The scan is the decision, made early. His group has a name for the part of the pitch that costs you: the blind side, the side you cannot see. Reading the blind side before the ball comes is the skill.

If you want the coaching detail underneath that, Tin Matkovic built a masterclass on exactly this, and he treats scanning as mapping rather than head-turning. Every time you turn your head you get one more piece of the puzzle, and the point is to have a route out before the ball arrives. He is also blunt about the failure mode most of us have seen on a Tuesday night: a player scans left, sees a defender there, and accelerates left anyway. That is scanning for the coach. Matkovic splits it into a defensive scan, where the body stays closed and you are reading whether the press is zonal or man to man, and an offensive scan, where the body opens because the picture lets you play forward. He also argues that off the ball, the free defender organising behind the play may be the most important scanner on the pitch.

The two coaches are describing the same skill from opposite ends. Matkovic gives you the training habit. Retegui tells you what the habit is worth at the top of the game. Robert Noall's work on training on-ball decision making is the bridge if you want the progressions that turn seeing into choosing.

One play, two plays, three plays is a good line. It is a better observation tool, and it is the reason to bother with any of this.

Take one player to a match and watch only them for ten minutes. Not the ball. Where is their head before the pass to them is made? When they receive, does the next action look chosen or does it look discovered? Then grade them honestly. Do they see the pass coming to them (one play). Do they see who they will give it to (two plays). Do they see what happens after that, and does it show in where they take their first touch (three plays).

That grade is not a verdict on a player. It is a note on where their reading currently sits, which is the thing you are trying to move.

Retegui is also honest that some players simply arrive with it. That cuts against how we usually talk about this, and it is worth sitting with rather than arguing away. He is not saying it cannot be developed. He is saying that when he watches world-class hockey, the players who see three plays ahead are recognisable, and it took them years.

Which is exactly why he selects the way he does.

A coach asked him straight out why squads pick the older players in an Olympic year, and whether the younger player is simply not efficient enough. He does not hedge.

"I like the older players a lot," he says, and then explains what he means by that.

His reference point is rowing, which he knows through his father, a rowing coach. The best rowers hit their peak after thirty-five. Triathletes the same. So why, he asks, do we look at hockey players at thirty and decide they are finished, that they can no longer play at the intensity a medal requires. He talked about players in his own group in their thirties, and about a goalkeeper he took to Rio still going at forty who moved like a twenty-five-year-old and read the game like a forty-year-old.

Now here is the catch, and it is the half that gets dropped every time this gets repeated.

"Now, if the older player comes with the whims, with the because-I-am-older-I-do-not-do-this, because I am older, or because I have. No, that is not it. There you are not in."

The bargain is explicit. Experience earns selection only when it arrives with commitment, discipline and total effort. He was careful to leave room for coaches who see it differently, reaching for an Argentine saying: every teacher with his own book.

Which turns a philosophy into two things you can actually check.

First, does this player still bring the standard every session. Not their best game, their normal Tuesday. Second, does the reading they have earned show up in the game. Use the scale above.

If both are yes, the birth year is noise. If the first is no, seniority makes it worse rather than better, because now a drop in standard has status attached to it and the group can see that too. Shea McAleese's session on coachability is the right next stop if you want to think properly about what a coach is entitled to ask of a player at any age, and Ric Charlesworth on building winning teams covers the same ground from the squad side.

Asked to describe what Argentina did on the way to gold in Rio, he is specific.

Three at the back. Individual pursuit in defence. One of the two central midfielders dropping in as a free defender on the line of the ball, because the central defender had a marking job of his own. From twenty-two metres forward, zone. "So it was a mixed system, which is the one I like most."

The reasoning is the part worth keeping, because it is a mechanism rather than a taste. Teams used to defend everything one against one, and then got hurt by rotations.

"Faced with a rotation and pursuing the opponent, you free up the space."

Chasing your man through a rotation is what opens the pitch. Once opponents worked that out, they started using it.

His fix inside a mixed system is not more chasing, it is handing players over. Pursuit from a chosen point of the pitch backwards, with the option to swap marks in front. If the defenders coordinate well, you take the player arriving instead of following your own man all the way across, and the door stays shut.

That is cheap to introduce, because it is mostly communication and trust rather than new patterns. Pick one line, name the point on the pitch where pursuit starts, and let them practise the handover until it stops needing a shout. Fede Tanuscio's session on defensive system variants works through the zonal and man to man trade-offs in more detail, and if the mixed approach appeals but your outletting keeps getting strangled, Robert Noall on training outletting against man to man marking is the practical companion.

My question was about trends, and his answer was refreshingly unglamorous: watch the best teams, and watch what they are actually doing.

He talks about ball control and possession, about midfielders rotating constantly, a forward becoming an inside player and an inside player becoming a forward. About forwards rotating inside the circle in a triangle or a diamond, moving in and out, taking deep positions, getting into an attacking body position so that the moment the ball arrives they are already a threat. And about preparation itself having to be integrated, because building a team capable of winning a major title means changing how you prepare, not only what you drill.

Then the line that explains why he cares so much about small things.

"When you want to be there for gold, silver or bronze, the growth factor is tiny. The detail is tiny, almost insignificant. But that insignificant detail is the one that makes the huge difference."

He was equally direct about Belgium's men, who he called the best team in the world at the time and described as playing total hockey. Everybody understanding everything, in every part of the pitch. "Anyone who wants to learn hockey should watch Belgium." He put it down to a federation president who saw where the sport was going when he took the job in his late thirties, and to the calm given to a very good generation. A long view, held for a long time.

The most transferable thing in the hour has nothing to do with Argentina, and it went past almost unnoticed.

He goes to the European Championship most years, deliberately, as a spectator. His reason is not the standard of play.

"I go to watch the Euros and it makes no difference to me who wins. So my head is neutral, and I can absorb everything we are seeing."

Sit with that for a second. Watching your own team, or a rival, or a tournament you have a stake in, puts you in a state where you are looking for confirmation. Neutrality is the only condition in which most coaches watch to learn rather than to check. He builds it into his year on purpose. Almost nobody else does.

Asked for the best advice he ever received, he does not name a coach. He names his parents. His father taught him to be his best version every second.

Then he transfers it to the squad, and the list is worth reading slowly: commitment, discipline, wanting to play, playing for the shirt, defending it with the heart, playing every ball as if it were the last, playing to help a team-mate, pride, and joy. On that last one he pushes back on a word most of us use carelessly.

"When they say it is a sacrifice, sacrifice is the person who does not have their health, sacrifice is the person without work. Sport is not a sacrifice, it is an effort."

He had just described a national coach's job as twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and then said it is far harder to drive a taxi for twelve hours, or to be a nurse in a hospital, or to spend six months at sea. That perspective is what stops the demand he places on players turning into self-pity.

Just before that sits a line that is really a coaching instruction. "You play as you train." Cedric De Vlieger's session on team, trust and culture is the natural next step if that is the part of your season that needs work.

He also refuses the pedestal. When Bernardo called him a figure of the sport, he told a story about his father instead.

And near the end, Eduardo Galeano on utopia. It moves a metre further away every time you take a step towards it, so you never arrive. "Utopia is there so you keep walking." He offered that as the thing to give a squad. Not a target they will hit. A reason to keep moving.

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