Your players are scanning. So why is nothing changing?

Walk onto almost any decent training pitch today and you can spot the coaching point that has been hammered all season. Heads turn. Shoulders check. Players look over both shoulders before the ball arrives, exactly as they have been told. And then the ball arrives, and they play the pass they were always going to play.

It is a bit like a driver who checks the mirrors, indicates properly, and then pulls out into the lane they had already decided on before they looked. The ritual is perfect. The information changed nothing.

That is the real problem in most squads now. It is not that players do not scan. It is that the scan and the decision have come loose from each other. Tin Matkovic put it bluntly in his masterclass on pre-scanning: "if you pre scan on the left and you see that the person is standing there and then the ball is coming and you still accelerate in the left, then you're scanning for sake of the scan but not for this additional what you can have."[1]

Robert Noall splits the moment into two separate phases, and it is a distinction worth stealing. There is the pre-scan phase, which happens while the ball is travelling towards you, and there is the on-ball phase, which happens once the ball is on your stick. In his workshop on on-ball decision making he walks through a clip of an under-14 international group and shows a player who pre-scans correctly, sees a teammate, decides to pass, and then executes that decision half a second after it stopped being the right one.

His point is that the second phase is a decision in its own right, not the delivery of the first one. "If she took one more look or changed her decision, had the confidence to change her decision while receiving the ball, she might have actually been able to attack through the space."[2]

Notice the word confidence. Changing your mind mid-reception feels, to a lot of players, like admitting the first look was wrong. If a team's training environment only ever rewards executing the plan, players will execute the plan into a closed door.

There is a technical layer under this too, and Noall is very direct about it. "Ball position, especially in this area of the field, is crucial for on ball decision-making because if you can't see the options, then you can't give them."[2] A player with the ball trapped at their feet has no second decision available, however well they scanned. The two things he names as separating players who can step up a level are ball position and constantly looking to see what decisions need to be made. Both, not one.

Here is the bit that most scanning drills quietly skip. Matkovic draws it as a zonal box: a midfielder scans, spots the exit point, plays back, the defender shifts across to close that exit, and the midfielder runs into it anyway. His diagnosis is one line long. The situation changed after the first scan.[1]

And sometimes there is no first scan to be out of date. Noall is realistic about this: "in a very dynamic game, not every pass you receive, you have the time to prescan. All the situations change very quickly."[2] Pre-scanning is a luxury of the build-up. Around the circle, the on-ball phase is doing almost all of the work.

Which means a team that has only trained looking before the ball arrives has trained the easier half of the problem.