Το αρθρο ειναι του Rob Draper απο την Daily Mail. Φυλλαδα ειναι, αλλα για το συγκεκριμενο post εκφραζει αρκετα τη γνωμη για το ποδοσφαιρο (με αφορμη καποια σχολια χτες που ειχαμε). Το αφηνω ως εχει στα Αγγλικα για οποιον δε βαριεται και μπορει να μπει στο πνευμα..
No tactics, please; we’re British. It’s a mantra of our game. Graeme Souness recently related a particular classic of that school of thinking in this.
About to make his debut for Liverpool at West Brom, he leant across to Bob Paisley’s assistant, Joe Fagan, and said: ‘Joe, I’ve been here a week and no-one has said anything to me. How does the manager want me to play?’
So Fagan raised his voice to ensure the whole dressing room could hear and replied: ‘F*** off! We spent all this money on you and now you’re asking me how to play football!’ Cue laughs all round in the dressing room with a young man put firmly in his place.
Now Fagan and Paisley were typical of their generation in their self depreciation, as Souness makes clear.
‘Bob Paisley would regularly say: “Can someone please tell me what leading the line means? Or what an effing blind side run is?” And he used to chuckle then. So what he’s doing now looking down on us, he must chuckling every time football comes on the telly. There’s nothing new in football.’
And Souness has absorbed that way of thinking too, literally chuckling himself as reels off the ‘new buzzwords: the false nine, the philosophy, the project.’
But it just isn’t true, the idea that there was nothing special about English football. Nor is it true that Souness doesn’t do tactics; he’s probably of the smartest TV analyst of his generation.
If any other country dominated European football, as the English did between 1977 until the European ban of 1985, we would endlessly dissect their football culture for clues as to what was tactically distinctive about it.
But we never shout about it, because we’ve been schooled by the likes of Fagan and Paisley never to let on that we’re thinking too hard, nor to allow anyone to consider themselves too special.
One ex-Liverpool player of that era remembers that every training session Fagan and Paisley put on – and innovatively all work was done with the ball – related to a specific area of the game and the team shape. He says they wouldn’t have talked about pressing but only because they called it ‘countering’; all strikers were taught to chase back and pressure the opposition, midfielders were expected to add support.
Those Liverpool teams, which won four European Cups between 1977-1984, were extraordinary and best Europe had to offer couldn’t get to grips with them: between 1976-1979 the only team to beat them over two legs in the European Cup was Nottingham Forest
And it’s well known that Forest manager Brian Clough’s public attitude to tactics was as dismissive as Fagan. ‘There’s no plan,’ Martin O’Neill remembers him saying. ‘Just give it to John Robertson. He can play.’
It’s a nice line but not strictly true. Talking to Tony Woodock last week, who played in that great Forest side, elicited more. ‘Although we could retain the ball and keep possession we were constantly being probed to go forward and win the game, win the game.’ Other principals were instilled in those sides. ‘Working hard is not a dirty word,’ rememebered Woodcock. ‘Everyone is working hard for each other. We were aggressive and worked hard but we could play as well.’
Most interesting though is Woodcock’s explanation of pressing. ‘Keeping a clean sheet started with your front men being your first line of defence and playing attacking football meant your defenders had to be your first line of attack. It’s not rocket science.
‘And if you lose the ball, you basically have two or three seconds to try to get the ball back. Of course, we wouldn’t run all the way back. We’d be expected to pass players on. But you wouldn’t be expected to stand around and let them play through.’
The more you probe that period of English football, the more intriguing it becomes. Because it you put those words in the mouth of Jurgen Klopp or Pep Guardiola, we would immediately take notice.
The energy of English teams of that period was a much under-rated characteristic, though it isn’t now not by the likes of Klopp and Guardiola, nor by Mauricio Pochettino, one of the best tactical coaches in the Premier League.
‘Gegenpressing’ is the phrase of the moment because of Klopp’s arrival at Liverpool (and surely Paisley is chuckling away). Yet English sides did that particularly well in the 70s and 80s. Of course, they weren’t as organised as Barcelona were under Guardiola or Klopp’s teams. That’s because the technology and satellite television didn’t exist to analyse very detail of every game. Even so, Fagan wrote down every training session the players did in a ledger to compare and contrast as the season progressed. For all their bluster, these were men who thought deeply about the game.
Pressing is nothing new. Quique Sanchez-Flores, another foreign coach impressing in the Premier League, was making this point the other day. What Guardiola brought to the game which was new, according to Sanchez-Flores, was ensuring numerical superiority over the opposition in a particular area of the pitch when pressing.
And if you really want to analyse why Premier League sides have fallen away in Europe it is arguably because none of the coaches currently in the top flight of the Premier League, Jose Mourinho apart, have got to grips with that new phenomenon in the game. And even Mourinho, as his 5-0 defeat at the Nou Camp in 2010, has struggled with it.
No-one great manager these days would cite English football as a particular influence in their tactical make up. Marcelo Bielsa, Arrigo Sacchi and Johan Cruyff stand out as the godfathers and it is true that they thought about football harder than most, developed teams that spread their philosophy (cue more chuckles from Paisley and Souness) and gathered disciples.
Yet in England we shouldn’t be shy about shouting about what our club sides did and re-evaluating what they taught us. They combined the best passing and added intensity and pressing to it which unsettled continental Europe.
More recently, continental teams have added intensity and pressing to their superior technical skills and that in turn has unsettled the Premier League.
But if we are to find ways of countering that development, it would help to acknowledge that there is actually rich English tradition on which to draw and re-write the wrongs of the past. English football did do tactics in the 1970s and 1980s. Good tactics. They just didn’t like to talk about.
Θα προσθεσω μονο δυο (απο τις πολλες) ατακες του Bill Shankly:
- To Tommy Smith, who tried to explain that his bandaged knee was injured:
“Take that bandage off. And what do you meanabout YOUR knee? It’s Liverpool’s knee!”
- “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
