I know I want to make this a blog only regarding bands and music, but I found this article on football tactics rather interesting. So here sharing it.
Football The Guardian
Popular
football
Series The Question
The Question: is this
the end for tiki-taka?
The success of defensive rigidity and
rapid counter-attacks against
possession football hints at another
tactical evolution
461
Pep Guardiola has tried to implement tiki-taka
at Bayern this season but found his system
ineffective againt Real's counter-attacking style.
Photograph: Matthias Schrader/AP
Jonathan Wilson
Thursday 1 May 2014 10.57 BST
People are unhappy. They're
unhappy at teams like Bayern
Munich who keep the ball,
preserving possession and
looking to pass opponents into
submission, and they're
unhappy at teams like Chelsea
who defend deep, allow
opponents to have the ball and
try to pick them off on the break.
People, over the past fortnight,
have declared themselves bored
by – and opposed to – both
proactive and reactive football.
That's not actually as
contradictory as it sounds. We
live in an age of extremes. When
Barcelona first started to play
tiki-taka under Pep Guardiola,
they began to achieve
unprecedented levels of
possession. For the first time
probably since Arrigo Sacchi's
Milan almost two decades
previously, there was a new
philosophy about. This wasn't
just a minor tweak of
positioning, a tendency for one
centre-forward to drop slightly
deeper, or for the full-backs to
push a bit higher. It wasn't a
slight change of shape: it was a
whole new style.
It took the basic tenets of total
football to previously
unimagined extremes – in part
because of an exceptional
generation of players many of
whom had been schooled in a
particularly idiosyncratic style at
La Masia, in part because of a
visionary coach in Guardiola,
and in part because of the
changes in the offside law that
increased the size of the
effective playing area and so
permitted smaller, more
technical players to flourish.
When totaalvoetbal emerged as a
term in the Netherlands in the
early 70s, the totaal aspect of it
was part of a wider movement in
Dutch culture, particularly
architecture. JB Bakema, one of
the theory's prime exponents,
argued that all buildings should
have individual characteristics
but should be designed with
their place in the overall
environment in mind. The
application of the term to
football made sense in terms of
Bakema – the whole point of it
was that players were aware of
their positions within the system
and were constantly
renegotiating it for themselves;
but there was also, at least
outside of the Netherlands, a
more popular resonance. This
was total football because
everybody, it seems, could do
everything: defenders could
attack and attackers could
defend.
Although tiki-taka shared with
total football the high defensive
line, the interchanging of
positions and the sense that the
game could be controlled
through possession, its
characteristics were far from
total: everything became
sublimated to the pass. The
centre-forward became a false
nine because that enhanced
fluidity of movement and
created additional angles to keep
the ball moving; the full-backs
played higher up the pitch than
ever before; midfielders were
selected in defence for their
passing ability from deep; even
the goalkeeper had to be able to
play the ball out from the back.
For a time, football seemed not
to know how to react. When
Chelsea came so close to
eliminating Barça in the
Champions League semi-final in
2009, the assumption was that
the great physicality of Premier
League teams could brush them
aside, yet Manchester United
never got anywhere near them
in the final. The semi-final the
following year, and the defeat to
José Mourinho's Internazionale,
came as a watershed. Yes, Inter
were fortunate in some respects,
but at the same time there were
spells in the second leg of that
tie – spells the significance of
which perhaps wasn't fully
recognised at the time – in which
Barça were reduced to endless
sideways passing, bereft of
imagination and verticality. Yes,
Barça missed chances they
would usually have taken and,
yes, Bojan Krkic's late strike
should have counted, but the
lesson was there: radical
possession football could be
defeated by radical non-possession football.
In his controversial biography,
Diego Torres explained the code
Mourinho came up with at Real
Madrid for handling games
against high-class teams,
particularly away from home:
"1) The game is won by the team
who commits fewer errors. 2)
Football favours whoever
provokes more errors in the
opposition. 3) Away from home,
instead of trying to be superior to
the opposition, it's better to
encourage their mistakes. 4)
Whoever has the ball is more
likely to make a mistake. 5)
Whoever renounces possession
reduces the possibility of making
a mistake. 6) Whoever has the
ball has fear. 7) Whoever does
not have it is thereby stronger."
That's the theory Mourinho used
in the first leg against Atlético
and last Sunday against
Liverpool. Others, in a more
diluted form, have followed:
Real Madrid were quite happy to
sit deep and absorb pressure
against Bayern, both at home
and away, capitalising on
Bayern's inability to counter the
counter (Uefa's technical reports
show the number of goals scored
from counter-attacks has fallen
from 40% in 2005-06 to 27% last
season; the increased efficiency
of the attack-to-defence
transition is one of the great
developments of the last decade,
something discussed in detail in
the quarter-finals issue of
Champions magazine) and their
haplessness at set-pieces (a
persistent flaw in Guardiola
sides, perhaps rooted in his
insistence on picking defenders
who can pass rather than those
who can mark and win headers).
Mourinho was quite open about
his switch to a defensive
approach in this spell at Chelsea.
"We may have to take a step
back in order to be more
consistent at the back," he said
in December after his side's
Capital One Cup quarter-final
exit to Sunderland. "It's
something I don't want to do, to
play more counter-attacking, but
I'm giving it serious thought. If I
want to win 1-0, I think I can, as
I think it's one of the easiest
things in football. It's not so
difficult, as you don't give
players the chance to express
themselves."
Their next game, nine days later,
was the 0-0 draw at Arsenal and
a new tone had been set. Against
teams prepared to attack
Chelsea, the change of approach
was hugely effective, but against
other counter-attacking sides or
teams who prefer to sit deep, it
left Chelsea vulnerable to
mistakes, misfortune and
moments of brilliance from the
opposition. As Mourinho himself
noted on Sunday after the win at
Liverpool, it's one thing to set
out defensively, quite another to
have the discipline to complete
the job. "I am a bit confused
what the media thinks about
defensive displays," he said.
"When a team defends well you
call it a defensive display. When
a team defends badly and
concedes two or three goals you
don't consider it a defensive
display."
Wednesday demonstrated the
problem. Eden Hazard's lapse in
allowing Juanfran to run beyond
him led to Atlético's equaliser
and Chelsea were chasing the
game. Mourinho brought on a
second striker in Samuel Eto'o
and, even leaving aside the fact
it was his foul that conceded the
penalty, the addition of a second
striker surrendered midfield.
"That made it possible to bring
in five midfielders," said Diego
Simeone, who brought on Raúl
García for Adrián López 12
minutes after Eto'o's arrival. "We
benefited from that: it left a lot
more space for us to control the
game."
In itself, the notion that
possession is dangerous is
nothing new. Egil Olsen
discovered in the 80s that in the
Norwegian league a side was
more likely to score before the
ball went out of play if the
opposing goalkeeper had the ball
than its own. What is different is
the degree, while the dynamic
when, for want of better terms, a
Guardiola-ist team meets a
Mourinho-ist team, is wholly
new. One team is voracious in its
appetite for the ball, the other
has no interest in it, and the
result is that one side can have
75-80% of possession – and this
is the crucial part – without ever
really being in control of the
game.
That's a natural part of
evolution. A thesis (radical
possession) arises, an antithesis
(radical non-possession) arises
to combat it and at some point a
synthesis is achieved that will
govern the consensus of how the
vast majority of clubs will play
for the next few years. That the
two extremes are so seemingly
unpopular is revealing, less in
the preference it suggests on the
part of the majority of fans for
football with a more traditional
narrative of cut and thrust, than
in the depth of the hostility.
That suggests a potential new
influence on the tactics of the
future: while most fans quite
logically prioritise winning,
could it be that the growth in the
global, less partisan, audience
and the commercial need to
appeal to it, leads teams to
favour football with a more
overt aesthetic appeal?
The other oddity in the reaction
to Bayern's defeat has been the
number of attacks on Guardiola
and the assertion that tiki-taka is
dead. In five seasons as a
manager, Guardiola has won
four league titles, two domestics
cups (and is in another final),
two Champions Leagues and
three Club World Cups. Even
given the dominance of the
present era of superclubs, that is
a phenomenal record. But the
idea that tiki-taka is over, that
Barcelona's defeat to Bayern last
season and Bayern's defeat to
Real Madrid somehow invalidate
an entire philosophy, is to
misunderstand the whole nature
of tactics.
In tactics there are no absolute
rights and there aren't many
absolute wrongs: there is
certainly no magic formula.
Tactical theorists aren't like
alchemists searching for the
quintessence that will explain
everything. There is evolution
and development in tactical
thinking, but everything is
contingent on other factors; the
same structuralist theory that
underpinned Bakema teaches
that nothing is not relative. Tiki-taka worked so well at Barcelona
in part because of the technical
ability of the players, in part
because opponents were still
adjusting to changes in the
offside law and in part because
of the intensity of their play. You
can get away with a high line
and passers rather than
defenders in the back line only if
there is ferocious pressure on
the ball.
One of the reasons for
Barcelona's slide from the very
peak is that they have lost that
intensity: stats from
Whoscored.com show that
Lionel Messi, for instance, has
gone from retrieving possession
through tackles or interceptions
2.1 times per league game in
2010-11 to 0.6 this season.
Bayern were noticeably lacking
in zip and zest in both legs
against Real Madrid, perhaps
because after such a glut of
success over the past two
seasons their hunger has been
dulled, perhaps because they
have won the league so easily
this season that a certain edge
has been lost and perhaps
because Guardiola made tactical
errors.
There are those who have
argued that Bayern destroyed
tiki-taka in the semi-final last
season and that it was therefore
an enormous error to try to
implement it at Bayern this
season. That, though, is to
ignore the fact that Bayern last
season were a highly proactive,
possession-oriented side in
pretty much every game other
than those against Barcelona:
domestically, only Barcelona
had more possession in the top
five leagues in Europe last
season; only Barcelona had more
possession in the Champions
League group stages last season.
In those semi-finals, Jupp
Heynckes recognised that
Barcelona were better at
retaining possession and so set
his side up to play reactively,
with great success.
None of that means tiki-taka is
finished as a system. None of
that means teams will not
continue to try to control games
through possession. What does
seem to be the case, though, is
that the examples of Inter in
2010 and Chelsea, against both
Barça and Bayern in 2012, has
radicalised the approach of
reactive teams when
encountering tiki-taka, and that
will probably prevent it ever
again enjoying the pre-eminence
it enjoyed at Barcelona between
2009 and 2011 – just as total
football, or at least the version
with an aggressively high
defensive line, never quite
dominated the club game again
after the break-up of Ajax after
the 1973 European Cup final. It
was a specific way of playing for
a specific set of players in a
specific set of circumstances at a
specific time. Its influence was
profound, as that of Guardiola's
Barcelona was and assuredly will
continue to be. Whether that
style will ever dominate in the
same way again is another issue.
Once the evolutionary wheel has
turned, it rarely goes back.
Tags: Football tactics, Bayern Munich, Barcelona
All Comments (461)
Guardiola had the great fortune of
having exceptional players like MessI,
Xavi and Invest to implement that kind
of football . Before him Rijkaard had
Ronaldinho , Xavi and Iniesta also very
successful , but 'failing' at very other
club . So maybe the contribution of
those exceptional players is greater
than it's system they play ?
One team is voracious in its appetite for
the ball, the other has no interest in it,
and the result is that one side can have
75-80% of possession – and this is the
crucial part – without ever really being
in control of the game.
That's a natural part of evolution. A
thesis (radical possession) arises, an
antithesis (radical non-possession)
arises to combat it and at some point a
synthesis is achieved that will govern
the consensus of how the vast majority
of clubs will play for the next few years.
So the future of football might be
something similar to the famous Monty
Python sketch of two teams just
standing around waiting for the others
to do something with the ball,
anticipating the current debate by 40
years - incidentally around the same
time Athletico lost to Bayern in their last
final, a match which also featured
Beckenbauer the surprise selection on
Python's Germans. All we need to know
now what was the flash of insight
Archimedes had in the 90th minute that
changed his mind, or was that just the
ultimate counter attacking sucker
punch leaving the Germans tacically
baffled as Bayern were against Real?
