Sharpness

[Internomad]

I have a young player who has a 'thumbs down' for Sharpness.  If I try to select him for a match I am advised by my backroom staff that he shouldn't play because of his lack of Sharpness.  So how am I supposed to get him sharp again?

[Draakon]

An orthodox way is to send him out as a sub in a couple of games, give him 30 minutes per game and then start him. Or at least that's the advice. Your staff assumes the starters should play at least 60-70 minutes and assess that he lacks sharpness to get through all 70-90 minutes of football.

 

In reality it's much more complicated. If you have a compact schedule and you play two games per week, then 30 minutes of football twice a week will improve sharpness of that player, but if you play just once in a week it doesn't make too much difference so it takes too much time for him to get match fit again. And that could be problematic if he's a first team player who has expectations about his game time.

More often or not I just ignore the advice and send him out in the starting line-up. Just a couple of things you need to keep in mind:

• his fitness will decrease faster, so it's better to sub him in the second half to avoid injuries
• allegedly his performance is not the best if his sharpness is low, so it depends on a game and opponent that you have - if you anticipate an easy game you can have one player in the line-up who is not really match fit, but if you include 3-4 such players then the overall performance of your team could suffer