Sharp angle cross goal finishing drill

This drill is meant to simulate the finish you perform from a sharp angle, close to goal. Often it’s strikers and wingers that get into this situation, and it’s a very frequent type of finish. Most of the time the finish comes from beating the last defender 1 on 1 directly, or getting a through ball.

The best way to finish from this angle is either with a near-post shot often with some air under the ball, which this drill focuses on, or with a far-post ground shot, which the sharp angle cross-goal finishing drill practice. You can easily pair the two drills if you want to work on both types of finishes. This is where it’s hardest for the goalkeeper to reach the ball, when you finish from this angle. And mastering both drills allows you to, when getting into this position, picking out the right spot to finish, be comfortable, calm and execute the shot.

When finishing at the near post, it’s very hard for the goalkeeper to react, and even more so when the ball is being placed in the top of the goal, therefore this is your focus when doing this drill.

The goal is to practice this as game-like as possible. This means that we want to perform the drill, where it looks like an in-game situation as much as possible. The video shows different variations of the drill, to simulate the different in-game situations. It’s up to you to pick and choose what type of pre-shot variants you think is best to work on. We recommend switching between all of them

The first one is beating the direct 1v1 duel on the outside and then finish. The second one is chaos dribbling, and practices dribbling in between defenders followed by the finish of course. And the third one is receiving a pass, controlling the ball and finish. If you are on your own and not sure how to rebound the ball, check out our guide How to solo rebound the ball