Football is evolving, and how...gone are the days when teams used to
line up with a default formation of 4-4-2 or a 5-3-2 and collide against
each other in a game of skill and physicality. Great managers like Helenio Herrera, Arrigo Sacchi, Rinus Michels, Bob Paisley and Sir Matt Busby always played the same formations, and almost always, the same
tactics. Managers like Paisley, Brian Clough, Johann Cruyff and Telê Santana always stuck to an ideology which formed the basis to their
tactics and gameplay. And they were successful in creating some of the
greatest teams in the history of the game.
A fast forward to the modern day game would see the likes of Jürgen Klopp, André Villas-Boas and Joachim Löw no longer sticking to a simple
game plan. In fact, not many managers are ideology-driven today, as
they are success-driven. Their tactics are evolving with time, and more
importantly, self-evolving. To put things in perspective, on one hand
you have a Pep Guardiola, who devotionally follows the time-tested ways
of Barcelona, and on the other, a José Mourinho, who carves success out
of outsmarting the opposition. In the former’s case, the ideology is
more important, and drives the tactical aspect of the game, whereas in
the latter’s case, there is no ideology, and the tactics are more
dependent on the opposition.
It would be futile to argue on which is a better approach, and I will
leave it to the readers to decide for themselves, as that is not the
subject of this article in itself. I would only like to hint at how
football is progressing, and how the modern game of football is
evolving. It is rather interesting to see what Raphael Honigstein of
‘The Guardian’ stated after Bayern’s defeat to Dortmund:
“After a decade in which having a strong “footballing identity”
was seen as a must, Klopp’s approach tantalisingly hints at a
post-ideological future when there will only be micro-tactics left”
What does this mean to the game? And more importantly, what does it
mean to the common fan? There must be a lot of questions that arise in
the readers’ minds.
But before all that, what is ‘micro-tactics‘?
To put it simply, micro-tactics is management at its highest level of
complexity. Micro-tactics refers to defining each player’s role in a
team to the last detail possible. But micro-tactics in football needn’t
mean the same, as strategising need not mean telling others what to do. A
large part of success comes from drawing a line as to where not to tell
them what to do. No player would like to be bogged down with
limitations imposed on him, even though a level of control is necessary.
Micro-tactics also gives rise to tactics and formations that play best
to the abilities of the players available, as opposed to asking the
players to play according to an ideology. This allows the coach to
extract the most out of the group of players, and thereby perform best
to their abilities.
Football, as a game has evolved so much commercially and
strategically, that it is no more just a game. Back in old days, it was
played for pride and passion for the game. Money, and more importantly
success has taken over as the prime motivation today. Head coaches today
don’t have the luxury of building a team over 3 or 4 years and then
trying to win something. Players want to play at the highest level and
add to their silver collection right from the time when they are teens.
Post-ideological football will be very different from what we have
witnessed over the past decade or two. For a start, new player positions
like “defensive targetman” and “fantasista” have evolved recently,
which were not in use before.
What has been central to the gradual shift towards micro-tactics has
been the rise of young managers like André Villas-Boas, Joachim Löw,
Jürgen Klopp, Slaven Bilić, Ciro Ferrara and the likes. José Mourinho
opened the floodgates by winning the league and the Champions League
with an inexperienced Porto side at a very young age, and since then, we
have had many young managers achieving various degrees of success with
mostly young sides.
Mourinho has always been known for his tactical display on the field.
He would shut the opposition out, and play from the back of the
formation, with the striker expected to play more than one role. The
midfielders and defenders are on strict instructions on how to play on
the pitch. Most of his success comes from loading his own box with
defending players and playing long balls up front. It is more probable
that he would be remembered as the coach who killed the flair, rather
than an advocate of the beautiful game. What an average fan forgets to
notice is the kind of discipline and groundwork that goes into it. The
manager has to convey to the last bit of instruction, to the players in
order for such a tactic to work, as opposed to a free flowing game.
For a team that doesn’t train to a particular philosophy, it is all
the more difficult to adjust and readjust themselves every week as the
opposition changes. A manager needs to take into account the mentality
of the players, and the trust they have on each other while devising
tactics, apart from intensive scouting of the opposition. Here is where a
manager’s intelligence and astuteness comes into play. It is believed
that the German coach Joachim Löw scouts his opposition so thoroughly
that he comes up with a list of five formations they play, and prepares
his side intensively to play three of them. All with a single formation
they play, that is a 4-2-3-1. What changes is the individual
instructions. Broadly, there are two versions of the formation that Löw
employs. One is a regular 4-2-3-1, which plays by retaining the ball and
moving it quickly from one player to the other, while retaining the
shape. The other, which is played against attacking teams, is a deep
4-2-3-1, which works more on counters, and mostly through the wide men,
while Özil plays as a shadow striker. But Löw is able to play any
formation that is put in front of him, just by tweaking how individual
players are supposed to play on the field.
It is a similar case with Jürgen Klopp, whose team Borussia Dortmund
primarily employs a 4-2-3-1, but there are broadly at least three ways
in which they operate – an attacking version which involves quick and
short passes, building up from the back, a deep variant which relies
more on long passes and use of width, and an asymmetric version, which
seeks to expose weaknesses in the opposition. Dortmund have performed so
well, that they have been crowned the German champions this season. A
lot of credit goes to the coach for identifying players that suit his
tactics, and the players themselves for executing the plan on the pitch.
No amount of writing would suffice to stress upon the importance of
scouting in the modern game. Every game is scouted, every move is
dissected, and every weakness is laid exposed by the shrewdest of the
managers. A case in point is Andre Villas-Boas, head coach of Porto, who
are the new Portuguese champions and Europa League finalists.
Villas-Boas, who grew up strategising and performing background work for
great managers like Bobby Robson and José Mourinho. He is so good with
his scouting of the opposition, that a picture from Chelsea tactic
boards revealed that he scouted oppositions for Mourinho down to details
like the average jump height of opposition players during set piece
defending. By analysing the opposition to that deep a level, there is
little that one could do wrong. In his first season at Porto, he is
undefeated in the league, winning 46 out of the 53 matches he has been
in charge of, losing just 3. Stupendous indeed!
While there is a definite shift towards micro-tactics, it would be
wrong to say that a definite football philosophy does not win you
anything. Guardiola’s Barcelona have been winning almost every
competition that they participated in, ever since he took charge. There
are managers like Manuel Pellegrini and Carlo Ancelotti who involve
micro-tactics within a philosophy, and there are managers who are
gradually shifting from a definite philosophy to open-ended modern game.
Whatever may be the reason – may it be success or lure of fame and
recognition, or the fear of losing or obsession with winning, or plain
outsmarting the opposition, the game is changing. It is drifting towards
a post-ideological era, where only micro-tactics will remain. And
football will all be about numbers, stats and figures. That is not to
say that the beautiful game will lose all its flair and magic. For there
will always be a Messi in an Argentine team playing to a plan, a Zidane
in a disjoint French team, and a Del Piero in Juventus shirt playing
their hearts out, for the love of the game more than anything else.
No comments:
Post a Comment