© EuroFootball.com
Renowned athletics and physical sports preparation coach, head of the Sports Training Department at LKKA, Professor Aleksas Stanislovaitis, claims that the reason for Lithuania's football failures is physical fitness.
"Every LKL team has an athletic trainer. Tell me at least one Lithuanian football team that has one. I was once such an athletic football practitioner at Kaunas "Žalgiris" a few years ago, when we became Lithuanian champions twice," said A. Stanislovaitis.
He is convinced that Lithuania's football failures are directly related to physical fitness. More precisely – the inability of football coaches to organize the players' preparation.
"E. Kandratavičius, who works with the Lithuanian national basketball team, started with handball, later worked with football players. He then went to Amsterdam and attended a lecture with the "Ajax" coach. He found out that "Ajax" has four physical training coaches. One of them is responsible for strength, another for speed, the third for endurance. They meet with the head coach, develop a common strategy, and train the players. They know that some players need to improve certain qualities, others – different ones. And our clubs have only one, smarter than all specialist. That's why our results are as they are."
According to A. Stanislovaitis, in Ukraine, more attention is paid to physical training for football players than in Lithuania.
He described football similarly to basketball: "All coaches who think that football is a 90-minute endurance exercise should be fired. Because competition shows that football is 30% power, 20% power endurance, and 50% doing nothing. Football players used to cover 6-8 kilometers in 90 minutes. Now they run up to 14 kilometers. But here's an example: in an hour and a half, Lithuania's walking record holder Kristina Saltanovič, who made it to the world championship finals, walks 20 kilometers.
If a football player runs 30 m in 5 sec., with the ball he won't make it in that time, but if he runs without the ball in 3.8 sec., then we can achieve that he runs with the ball in 4 seconds. Then he will be particularly fast, particularly powerful. In the European championship, people move, run, in the Lithuanian championship – they stand in one place with bent legs. And I immediately see that they lack athletic preparation."
