In March 2019, Manchester United lost the first leg 2-0 to Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16 rounds of the Champions League. They entered the first half leading 2-1. Wanting one more goal to score an away goal, their manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær made an illogical masterstroke: he sat back. Almost nothing happened for half an hour. PSG pressed hesitantly, first confused, then worried. And then Solskjær launched his attack on panicking opponents, United won a penalty – a stupid, modern, European handball, but a penalty nonetheless – and managed to break through.
This was Solskjær at his peak and the result left Gary Neville asking where he wanted his statue. Solskjær’s record at this point was P17 W14 D2 L1; He was still elated about not being José Mourinho. The struggle to implement offensive structures had not yet been revealed. But where he proved adept was in reading and manipulating the emotional flow of a play.
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It’s a high-risk strategy, of course. If PSG had continued, everyone would have asked why Solskjær stayed behind, why he reduced the second half to a 15-minute game. But it worked because Solskjær understood that PSG were scarred by failure and prone to collapse under pressure; The United side at that point had complete confidence in him as a conduit of the 1999 comeback spirit.
They would wait and go when he told them to, and they would do it with more ferocity and conviction than they could have done in that last quarter of an hour, during those 45 minutes when every blocked attack could have sapped their self-confidence, every successful attack could have sapped their self-confidence. The counter may have doubled its duties.
Activating the emotions of a match is an outdated feature. For years English football was obsessed with heart and passion and tended to be skeptical of systems and tactics. It now appears that there was overcorrection. There is an obsession with process.
Data provides fascinating insights into the game, allowing pressing structures to be sharpened and increased efficiency all over the pitch, but there is also the danger of losing the human side of players, the fact that they have emotions, ups and downs. More importantly, these are not inevitable.
Statistics may show that a striker is always inconsistent, but they may suggest that the player will recover over time and convert one in 10 chances throughout his career. But in a crash, should the manager expect regression to the mean? Or try to figure out what’s wrong and put your arm around your shoulder/make a joke/suggest a technical or tactical change and perhaps try to increase that ratio to one in nine?
The idea that trust and practice are predetermined and immutable, perhaps even misleading, is one of the great lies of football’s statistical revolution. The data is not predetermined. But it’s not just about individual players; As Solskjær showed in Paris, there are moods in matches that can be controlled. Players can find new levels with the wind on their side; Even the best can collapse under pressure.
Take, for example, Brighton’s recent 4-2 win over Tottenham or Liverpool’s 2-0 defeat at Burnley. In both cases the winning team was so dominant, it should have been further ahead, and then became unexpectedly tense when the seemingly defeated opponent showed signs of resistance. It wasn’t enough on either occasion, though, as Crystal Palace came from 2-0 down to draw against Manchester City when a panicked Phil Foden hack secured the equaliser.
There are few absolutes in football; Almost everything is coincidental. Philosophies are important as guiding principles, but they are never “true” on their own; Football is not a problem waiting to be solved. What is appropriate in one situation is not necessarily appropriate in another.
Aston Villa have thrived this season with a high offside line, but it has cost them dearly at Old Trafford. They had looked tired since the second half of the Arsenal game: 2-0 up at Manchester United, unable to press with the intensity needed to prevent their opponents from passing into the backfield in the face of storm. four. And perhaps it wasn’t just a physical problem: would it be a surprise if players exhausted by the Christmas schedule found it difficult to follow detailed positional instructions or make the complex tactical decisions that have become an integral part of the modern game?
“This has nothing to do with coaching anymore,” Jurgen Klopp said before Liverpool’s 4-2 win over Newcastle. “Just recovery and then meetings, that’s the way it is.” This perhaps explains the disorganization and energy, the relentlessness but also the lack of precision of Liverpool’s games since the goalless draw against Manchester United (although this is just a feature of putting Darwin Núñez on the field time and time again).
To some extent this is the joy of Christmas football. There is a lack of control and inexperience due to not enough time for preparation, so even cool-headed players like Rodri can make basic mistakes (the flip side is the increased risk of injury and a perceived lack of “quality” if such things bother you).
This appears to have cost an increasingly depleted Arsenal, whose dependence on Gabriel Martinelli and especially Bukayo Saka has been exposed. It’s strange that during Mikel Arteta’s tenure as Arsenal manager, they have had a miserable run of four or five games each season, starting in December or January. Arteta once drew a heart and a brain holding hands as part of his team speech, but the head and process appear to have been over-prioritised.
Ideally, the two work in harmony, and managers adjust the processes represented by the brain to the psychological and physical state represented by the heart. Klopp has thrived by acknowledging how little coaching is possible at this time of year. Others did not. Even the best processes are random.