“SCANNING IS THE KEY TO IMPROVE YOUR VIEW AND DECISION MAKING ON THE FIELD.”
The two most important skills you don't train in football: Vision and Decision Making
How many hours a week do you spend to increase your technical capacity? To improve your dribbling, passing ability, shooting? In general, everyone focuses on increasing their technical capacity. While all of these skills are essential if you want to become a professional football player, would you be surprised if I told you that there are other skills in your game that you use more often and that you hardly ever practice?
The truth is, in a football game, you only spend 2 minutes of the game on the ball, which is if you're lucky. Of course, while you should make the most of these 2 minutes, if you don't perform well, you can turn a great performance into an average one.
That's why eyesight and ability to make decisions are two of the most important qualities a football player should have. These skills are the two skills you will use for the majority of the game. Using your eyesight to spot a runner from the opposing team or deciding whether to press… These two skills form the foundation of your off-the-ball time.
Vision and Decision Making Are Not Natural Talents
As you continue to progress as a young football player, you will often find that most of the other players around you are extremely technically talented. With modern coaching and tons of easily accessible training information, this is no surprise. But what separates the good from the great are the skills that are difficult to train.
Skills like vision and decision making are incredibly difficult to coach, and even harder to learn when training alone. Therefore, many people believe that these are natural or inherited abilities. - The truth is they're not. These skills can certainly be learned and developed over time.
The Secret to Improving Your Vision and Decision Making: Scanning
So if these skills are unnatural, but both incredibly difficult to learn, how can a player hone them? The answer is a skill that ties them together: scanning.
What is scanning?
Scanning is when a player temporarily turns their attention away from the ball to get some extra information. This could be checking the opposing player's position, looking for a gap in the defensive line, or looking for a teammate to play the next pass.
How Can Sensiball VR Improve Scanning Capability?
As we explained above, scanning skill is a difficult skill to develop on its own and you need to learn it in the field. But on the field, you must spend months or even years developing this ability. With scenarios developed by Sensiball VR, you will be able to improve your reaction ability and also your scanning ability much faster than in real life!
Below, you can see how Messi acted and scanned in this regard, through an example.