I want to tell you about a six-year-old who would spend afternoons practicing keep-me-ups in his tiny back garden in East London. This is the way that most youngsters develop ball control: trying to keep the ball in the air by kicking, kneeing and heading. It is one of the most popular training techniques in the game. At first the little boy was pretty average.
He could do five or six before the ball would elude his control and land on the ground. But he stuck at it. He spent afternoon after afternoon, slipping up again and again, but with each mistake learning how to finesse the ball, sustain his concentration, and get his body back into position to keep the sequence going.
Slowly the boy improved. After six months, he could get up to 50 keep-me-ups. Six months after that he was up to 200. By the time he got to the age of nine, he had reached a new record: 2,003. In total the sequence took around fifteen minutes and his legs ached at the end of it.
Only after getting to 2,003 did the boy conclude that he had mastered the art of keep-me-ups so he focused his attention on something new. You guessed it: free kicks. He spent afternoon after afternoon with Ted, his father, aiming at the wire meshing over the window of a shed at the local park. After a couple of years, he must have taken more than 50,000 free kicks at that park.
He went on to captain the England football team with a record amount of caps. His name is David Beckham.
Anyone can improve at anything, but only if they want to.
No one is born good at things, we become good at things through hardwork, practice and passion. If we want to be good at The Marble Group, it’s our choice.
