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Click here to see the video: Soccer Defense: How to Tackle

Jonathan Bornstein: Tackling is an important defensive skill that everyone should know. First of all, tackling is how your team wins possession of the ball in order to go from defense to offense. So when you tackle, you want to have some key concepts in mind. First of all, you want to lock your ankle and your knee so that you have a lot of strength going through the ball, another one is the timing of when you tackle; you don't want to tackle too soon because then you might miss the ball, you might miss the player and you always want to follow through the ball and make sure that the player doesn't go by you. And, lastly, you want to win the ball strongly and you want to be able to advance it into an attacking position.

So in this demonstration, what we're going to show you is that I'm going to keep my ankle and my knee locked tightly, I'm going to drive through the ball as I see it coming toward me and I'm going to try to win the ball from him and push it into my attacking half.

So, basically, we're going to go like this, I'm going to come in tight and just go through the ball and run with it and then, obviously, I've won the ball from the attacking player and now I'm moving forward. So now we're going to do it in real-time motion. So, obviously, I tackled him, I kept my ankles and my knees strong, I won through the ball and now I have the ball in my possession ready to go attack. And those are the key concepts of tackling.