How To Header A Football

Hi. My name is Matt Dilworth. I'm a Saturday Intermediate League goalkeeper, and I also run and manage my own Sunday league site.

Today, I'm going to take you through some football basics to help you get started. Alright, this is how to header a football. We're going to focus on heading it defensively, obviously, getting it away from an oncoming attack.

The key points here are obviously to be big and strong, you need to get yourself off the floor, in the air, and using your whole upper body - your neck and your back, your shoulders - to propel yourself forward, hit the ball right in the center of your forehead, on the meaty part of your forehead, to get the ball up and away as far away as possible. We're now going to concentrate on attacking the ball from set pieces or crosses from out wide. The key points here, probably most importantly, is that you want to try and get over the ball and head the ball downwards because it gives the goalkeeper, it makes it very much more difficult for him to get down low and save it with a little reaction time.

You need to obviously be a good judge of the cross, you need to be, again, getting yourself high up off the floor, and using your back, shoulders, and neck to get right over the ball, and again, hit the ball with the meaty part of your forehead. Try and head the ball down into the floor, so that it's hard for the goalkeeper to save it. Another type of header commonly used in football is the flick-on.

This can be used from maybe a goal kick, or the keeper's boot upfield, or throwing. Basically, if you're being marked tightly from behind, all you really want to do is sort of get up and use sort of the top of your head to flick the ball backwards so that you're teammate can run on to it. Again, you need to be strong, don't let your defender intimidate you.

Get up nice and high, and literally, just hit the ball off the top of your head, just so that it evades your opponent and goes behind him and allows your opponent, your teammate, to run on to it. .