Setup: Pods of four across half the pitch, a ball each pod, a keeper on each goal warming their restart to the side. Build the gears before any full kick or hard press.

How it works: Warm the three things the night depends on: kicking, moving to receive, and talking. Start with pod passing on the move rising to 30m kick-passes onto a moving receiver. Then add the call — the receiver names the kicker before breaking, so the habit of communicating on a restart begins now. Finish with a couple of walk-through presses at jogging pace: on a signal, the pod turns and closes down a nominated player, practising moving together on a trigger. Nothing maximal yet, just the patterns waking up.

Setup: Use a real goal and keeper as the opposition restart. Set six of their outfield players in a normal kickout spread, and six of yours matched up to press. Walk it before you run it. Spare balls behind the goal.

How it works: Build the press piece by piece. First, the shape: everyone takes a man and stands goal-side and ball-side, showing the keeper no easy short option. Then the triggers — agree what makes you go: the keeper turning to a favourite side, a receiver stepping toward the ball, a slow placement of the ball on the tee. On the trigger, the whole line squeezes up together and forces the long, contested kick you can compete for. Walk through each trigger, then jog it, then let the keeper genuinely try to beat the press so the reads become real. The aim is not to win every ball but to force the restart into the areas where you have cover and numbers.

Setup: Now flip it: your keeper, your six receivers, against six pressers in bibs. Full posts and real distances. This is the answer to the press you just built.

How it works: A pressed team needs a plan, not panic. Drill two or three set movements to beat a press: a receiver breaking hard to create a short option and a runner attacking the space behind, a switch where two players cross to lose their markers, and the safe pressure-release long ball down a channel when the short is not on. The keeper reads which is on and delivers. Rehearse each movement unopposed, then against a token press, then against a full one. The message is that keeping your own kickout is a rehearsed skill: when the opposition squeezes up, your runners already know the move and the keeper already knows the option.

Setup: Full game across the pitch, both goals and keepers, teams of ten to twelve in bibs. Every restart of play comes from a kickout — every score, wide and turnover restarts with a contested kickout, so the battle never stops.

How it works: Put both halves of the night together in a game that lives on restarts. When you have the kickout, run your rehearsed movements to keep it; when they have theirs, set your press and triggers to steal it. Keep score of two things on the whiteboard: the match score, and the kickout count — restarts won versus lost. Winning the second scoreboard usually wins the first, and seeing it in black and white makes players value a possession they used to treat as a break in play. Rotate the calling of the press so different leaders run it, and freeze the game briefly if a press breaks down to fix the trigger, then play on.

Setup: Walk two widths, then circle stretch — hamstrings, hips, calves and groin, twenty seconds a side after a night of squeezing and sprinting.

How it works: Ease it down and lock in the learning while it is fresh. Ask the leaders to name tonight's agreed press trigger back to you, and ask the receivers to name their go-to move to beat a press. If the group can say them out loud now, they will remember them on Sunday. Keep the talk short and the stretch long. Finish on the reflection question.