The Question: How will football tactics develop over the next decade?
The end of the goal poacher and the rebirth of the libero are two trends we are likely to see during the next 10 years
Could we see the death of the classic goal poacher in the next 10 years? Photograph: Peter Robinson/Empics Sport
It is hugely difficult to imagine the future as a radically different place, which is probably why so many visions of the future in the past century have stuck to three basic templates: silver suits and hover-boots; totalitarian nightmare; apocalyptic wasteland. Still, given the way football has evolved in the 146 years since it was codified, it is probably safe to assume that the age of revolutions is over, and that developments in tactics over the coming decade will be incremental rather than radical.
The great revolutions – passing, the move from 2-3-5 to W-M; catenaccio; the development of the back four; total football – all sprang up either in response to rule changes, or from a culture with little previous experience of football, and thus a less rigid conception of how it should be played. In the modern world of blanket television coverage, it is almost impossible for football to grow up in the sort of isolation that could allow tactical quirks to develop. As in so much else, globalisation is leading to homogeneity.
Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Vivek Ranadive, who coached his daughter's team of 12-year-olds into the US's national championships despite having no previous knowledge of basketball. Baffled by the way, as he saw it, basketball teams effectively took turns to attack, Ranadive applied the principles he'd picked up from football and encouraged his side to press the opponent in possession high up the court. I have no idea whether that would be effective at the top level of basketball, but my point is that if there is to be a revolution in football tactics, it will almost certainly come from another sport, or at least from a culture in which another sport predominates.
The possibility of revolution
It always strikes me when reading US and Japanese accounts of football that there is a dislocation, not merely in vocabulary, but in the way of thinking about the game. This is a generalisation, of course, but broadly speaking Europeans view football more as a continuum, the US and Japanese as a series of discrete events. Japanese magazines are full of intricate diagrams that look good but I'm not sure reflect the game as a whole, while I often detect a frustration from US commentators that football doesn't lend itself more readily to the sort of statistical analysis that predominates in American football and basketball.
One of the oddest comments on Inverting the Pyramid came from a US reviewer who expressed surprise that 140 years of tactical history seemed to have produced nothing more sophisticated than moving a player a little bit forward or back, and speculated on the impact an American football offensive or defensive coach might have on football. I would suggest that the anarchic nature of football, the lack of set-plays to be replicated and practised, militates against the sort complex pre-rehearsed moves he was talking about.
But I don't know for sure. It may be that the approach does eventually yield something profound and new and – at the moment – unthinkable, just as Allen Wade, the former technical director of the FA, instituted a new way of thinking about the game when he broke it down into multiple phases for his influential coaching course which produced a generation of coaches that included Roy Hodgson and Don Howe. He faced early opposition for being overly functional but, as the Swedish academic Tomas Peterson puts it, he introduced to football a "second order of complexity", a knowledge of its own working such as Picasso brought to painting or Charlie Parker to music.
Or maybe North Korea, which is about as close as football gets to the Maliau Basin, will take advantage of its isolation to generate something new. The team did, after all, play a 3-3-3-1 at times in World Cup qualifying which, if not revolutionary, is at least unusual. Isolation in itself, though, is not necessarily a good thing, because it often leaves the isolated vulnerable to predators to which the rest of the world has built up immunity – Argentina's humbling at the 1958 World Cup after years of Peronist isolation being the prime example.
The aeroplane model
Whether there is a revolution or not, evolution will continue. Justifying Dynamo Kyiv's switch to 4-4-2 in the mid-60s (which seems to have happened fractionally before Alf Ramsey's similar but independent change in England), Viktor Maslov said: "Football is like an aeroplane. As velocities increase, so does air resistance, and so you have to make the head more stream-lined."
Although the progression has not been straightforward, Maslov has broadly been proved right. Over the past year in the Premier League there has been a turn back towards 4-4-2 (or 4-4-1-1), but single striker systems remain common and in Spain 4-2-3-1 has been the default for some time. At Barcelona – and Arsenal have followed their shape – that itself is being modified, with the two wide attacking players further advanced and the second striker pulled back into a deeper playmaking role to form a 4-3-3.
What is fascinating about Barcelona's 4-3-3 is that while it may look roughly similar to the 4-3-3 of, say, José Mourinho's Chelsea, it has been arrived at via a different evolutionary route (through 4-2-3-1 rather than through the diamond), and so functions in subtly different ways – a useful reminder that tactics are a combination of formation and style and that, as cannot be said often enough, formations themselves are neutral.
Malsov's analogy requires a slight gloss, for to say a team must be streamlined doesn't make a huge amount of sense. What he meant, presumably, was that as the velocity of players increases, it becomes harder for them to find space, and thus more necessary for attacking players to come from deeper positions, making them harder to pick up.
As a general principle that remains true, although we would perhaps say now, having seen the goal-scoring success of Cristiano Ronaldo and Barcelona's forwards cutting in from the wings, that it is advantageous to play with attacking players coming from deeper or wider positions, which rather ruins the image of streamlining. Corollary to that is the use of false nines, centre-forwards who drop deep into a playmaking role, disrupting the opponent's marking scheme, as Lionel Messi did to such startling effect in Barça's 6-2 win at Real Madrid last season.
The two directions of the centre-forward
The false nine is one of two directions in which the centre-forward position seems to be heading (at the highest level – lower down, where control of possession and imagination of approach are necessarily less prioritised, the traditional virtues of being quick or big or predatory are still of value). If he is not refining himself out of existence, he is doing the exact opposite, and imposing himself as a powerful leader of the line and creator of space in the manner of Didier Drogba, Emile Heskey or even Bobby Zamora. Some, such as Dimitar Berbatov and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, combine both styles.
Either way, the situation has emerged whereby a striker's primary function is no longer to score goals, but to create the space for others to do so. Obviously it's advantageous if he can take chances, or even conjure up goals out of nothing, which is what makes Drogba and Fernando Torres so special, but increasingly goals alone are an inadequate measure by which to judge a forward. If the poacher isn't dead yet, he may well be in a decade's time.
Universality (in patches)
That diversification of the striker's role is part of the wider trend towards universality. It was an ideal first articulated by Maslov, before being more fully theorised by Valeriy Lobanovskyi and Arrigo Sacchi, and found its practical form not just at Dynamo and Milan, but also at Celtic in the late 1960s, and at Ajax and Bayern Munich in the 1970s.
The latter three had young teams who, maturing together, grew almost organically to play to each other's strengths and cover each other's flaws, developing a highly fluid style of play. At Dynamo and Milan, it was a conscious policy enforced by visionary coaches. I have my doubts as to whether their rigorously systematised approach is possible in an age of celebrity, but the more general logic of universality pertains.
An analogy can be drawn with table football. Get beyond a certain level, and the key attacking players become the back two because they have time and the space behind them to line up a shot; the three forwards thus take on a function as blockers. As full-backs in football proper have exploited the space they have been afforded and become more attacking, so wide forwards have become more defensive to close them down.
As that has happened, it has become apparent that the player with most space is no longer the full-back, but the second centre-back, which may lead to the return of the libero, something that can already be seen in the performances of Gerard Piqué. With the liberalisation in the offside law stretching the game so it tends to be played in four bands not three, it seems likely that the coming decade will see some elision of the roles of attacking centre-back and holding midfielder, and thus to teams effectively playing with three-and-a-half at the back.
The Hegelian model
Evolution, though, is not linear. It hops about, goes forward and back, and isn't necessarily for the better. Ten years ago, you'd have said football was becoming a game for physical monsters, but the success of the likes of Messi, Xavi, Andrés Iniesta and Andrey Arshavin suggest that while players with the physique of Cristiano Ronaldo clearly have certain advantages, there is still a place for the comparatively diminutive player with skill. And it's worth remembering that 30 years ago the decathlete-turned-full-back Hans-Pieter Briegel was hailed as the player of the future, only to be at least partly responsible for four of the six goals West Germany conceded in the World Cup finals of 1982 and 1986. Size remains something, but not everything.
To an extent, evolution is a game of cat and mouse: a space opens, it is closed, and so a space opens elsewhere. A rugby writer recently suggested to me that rugby World Cups tend not to produce attacking play because of a natural cycle. After each tournament, he said, law variations are brought in to open the game up, which works for a year or two, but by the time the next tournament comes around, coaches have worked them out and so it becomes more defensive again.
It seems to me that, with one or two exceptions – the 1925 change in the offside law, the 1992 outlawing of the backpass and the tackle from behind in response to the sterility of Italia 90 – football is strong enough to generate new ways of attacking on its own without recourse to tinkering with the game's mechanics, but the process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis is the same.
Lurking behind progress, though, are old ideas waiting to be reapplied. Most obviously in the past decade, Greece won Euro 2004 playing with man-markers, setting opponents a problem they had forgotten how to solve. The success Stoke had with Rory Delap's long throws last season fall into a similar category. Teams now have remembered how to counter them, and so they are no longer such a potent threat. It may even be that towards the end of the next decade, as centre-backs have got used to advancing, that the poacher is resurrected as a counter to attacking defenders.
But it seems fair to assume that the recognition of the holistic nature of football – of the team as energy-system, as Lobanovskyi put it – will become more widespread, particularly as statistical analysis becomes more sophisticated and the effects of events in one part of the pitch on events in another are more fully understood. To resurrect an old line, you don't win games by scoring goals, you score goals by winning games: by playing the game where you want it to be played, thus maximising your team's strengths and minimising those of your opponent
No comments:
Post a Comment