Bournemouth started the match. Last season they gained a certain reputation for their kick-offs; For example, Arsenal scored a goal in the 10th minute after a bluff where they attacked on the left and then attacked from the right. This time the kick-off at Old Trafford was much simpler, a kick back was taken and the ball was swung towards that wing as two men charged down the right. He was hit hard. None of the chasers had a chance of getting there and Manchester United left-back Sergio Reguilón let it go out for a goal kick.
The instinct was to think it was a waste and wonder why Bournemouth had given the ball away so cheaply. Considering the care they took during last season’s kickoffs, why are they so careless? It seemed a strange omission for a coach as respected and seemingly meticulous as Andoni Iraola to abandon a tactic that Gary O’Neil had been working on. Then United took the goal kick, attacked André Onana with a quick touch, followed by a slight panic (this wasn’t a time-wasting tactic against Liverpool last week; that’s what they always do) and he burst into the Bournemouth press and immediately came under pressure . pressure.
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That’s when the truth came out: giving away the goal kick was a deliberate tactic, or at least taken into account; If Antoine Semenyo had tapped Reguilón on the ball to create a cross opportunity, that would have been fine too; because the opposition goal kick represents a chance, at least when the opponent is as anxious as United to play from behind. This is the third era of football; A time when old certainties melt away and nothing is as it seems.
For more than a century, football was a field game. Goalkeepers took long shots. When a defender won the ball, his first thought was to clear the ball. Kick-offs involved punting the ball into the corner for a winger to chase, with a strong possibility of forcing the opponent to make a throw-in in a dangerous area. You didn’t have to be a long-ball fundamentalist like Charles Reep or Charles Hughes to think that the farther the ball was from your own goal, the safer you would be.
The ball being 100 yards away from the opponent’s goal is now considered more valuable than not being 30 yards away from the goal.
The mentality was so ingrained that the requirement for a goal kick to leave the field before touching another player was only removed in 2019. Almost no one played from the back, so no one had thought about the fact that pressing would be much easier if the kicking team had to wait for the ball to come out of the box and touch the ball a second time.
The language of football reflects much of the terminology taken from older forms of warfare: teams “camp” on their opponents’ turf, “siege” their goals, while defenders “dig in”, often with “rearguard actions”. ”. Sky commentator Gary Weaver is obsessed with goals. Everything is shaped according to the defense or capture of lands.
There were exceptions, but they were rare and controversial. Herbert Chapman was experimenting with counter-attacks after being appointed player-manager of Northampton in 1907. When he won the FA Cup with Huddersfield in 1922, he was censored by the FA in a vague letter expressing the hope: “There will be no similar behavior in any future final tie”. Karl Rappan developed a type of sweeping system with Servette in the 40s, followed by its heyday in the 50s and 60s. catenaccio in Italy.
However, starting from the mid-60s, two different types of football were emerging. Valeriy Lobanovskyi developed pressing in Kiev. Possession football dominated West Germany. And in the Netherlands the two have been combined in Total Football. This was a classic example of dialectical development: elite Italian teams liked to play without the ball, so their opponents had to figure out how to play with the ball better.
As pitches and equipment improved so that first touches could be guaranteed, and as the increasingly tiered economy of the game concentrated on talent, top possession teams such as Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona began to regularly enjoy 75% possession. This was Cruyff’s version of “if the ball is in their own half they can’t hurt us”; “They couldn’t score a goal if we had the ball.”
Football had become a game of possession of the ball, not a game of territory. Short goal kicks are now used by default because it is considered more valuable to have the ball 100 yards from the opposition goal than 30 yards from the opposition goal.
The past decade has largely been a reaction to the extreme dominance of possession engendered by the Guardiola model and has largely involved pressing harder or more efficiently. If Them I want the ball We We need to find better ways to get it back. Conflicts between Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp have been regular manifestations of this dynamic. Both have improved, Guardiola has become more direct and Klopp has transformed his heavy-metal football into something a little more ball-dominant.
I feel like it’s harder to categorize what’s going on right now (which might just be to say it’s new). The old distinction between land and property is no longer sufficient. Evolution is never completely cyclical: not every revolution brings us back to where we were because there is knowledge of what happened before; the pattern is spiral, not cyclical.
We are familiar with oppression, and this is becoming a new area of conflict, especially as we increase the complexity of data analysis. Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton are trying to provoke the press into forcing their opponents forward to open up space. On Monday, Enzo Maresca’s Leicester striker scored an increasingly familiar goal on a counter-attack from a Birmingham corner. Bournemouth’s Iraola understands that giving the opposition a goal kick is an opportunity to gain possession and initiate the transition. Teams playing set plays are now left somewhat defenseless as a result, even though they have the ball.
Strength is weakness, weakness is strength. After possession of territory and possession, football’s third era is a confusing, topsy-turvy one. The data has led us into the mirror where nothing is as it seems.