So that pre-season friendly took place at the very start of August and since then, much has changed. While
on holiday, I was successful in a job interview for a company based abroad about which I had first been unexpectedly notified by email around the end of July. I accepted the offer, so that pre-season friendly
turned out to be my final involvement with this team. I thanked them for a tough pre-season programme and wished them the best of luck for 2013-14. I'm not going to be any more specific as to where I now am based other than say that it's in Europe and I don't know the language at all - it's completely different to anything I've learned. Since moving I
didn't manage to play any football for the first few weeks as my new job required a training period, the hours of which did not permit me to attend training sessions for the side I plan on joining. Nonetheless I'd been keeping something resembling fit and the temptation to sample the local beer
every night was mostly quelled by the need to be up at 7am during the
week. It was still annoying that I had spent a good month or so of pre-season getting myself in very good shape by being put through some gruelling practices only to have much of that undone by a sudden change in milieu where I no longer had such easy access to that kind of routine. But that's what relocating away from home does to you, I suppose.
Thanks to my university's VPN network, watching the football back home is still a welcome possibility, and this is what I'd like to talk about for the moment. I have managed to get playing myself again but first I'd like to use the break in my own play as an opportunity to discuss something I've been meaning to for a while. . The standard of punditry on Match of the Day
has always been a bugbear of mine – attempting to analyse at least half a dozen matches in succession for a couple of minutes each is both impractical and a thankless task to begin with, but I never cease to be amazed by how often ex-professional
pundits who have played at the highest level miss the point in their analyses. What
they say is very general, and they tend to offer no insight at all into why
things happen and how they develop, rather opting for empty, general statements
like something a player could or should have done (in a broad area of the game
– by this I mean “he should defend this ball better” – obviously defending encompasses
many different things) at a particular moment. What irritates me the most is their lack of
understanding of players attempting to keep possession and appreciating its
value. If they lose the ball, it’s just dismissed as poor play for one reason
or another. The weekend of 17/18 August marked the start of another Premier League season and let's take an example from the opening day where the first game in the highlights was the evening kick-off between Swansea and
Manchester United. Swansea pulled a goal back late on having been
0-3 down after United player Danny Welbeck lost possession in his own half
having collected a cleared Swansea corner and trying to hold onto the ball. In
the post-match analysis with this goal being looked at, Alan Hansen somewhat
predictably commented that the striker was “trying to be too clever.” Hearing this irritates me because the people who
use it don’t really know what ‘clever’ or ‘too clever’ means. If, when a corner
is cleared, the ball falls to a player of the defending team just outside the
box, he is probably positioned there because the manager wants him to attempt
to set up a counter-attack in this situation rather than complete the clearance
by hacking it forward to nobody. Clearly the former is more difficult to execute
but also more likely to end up as a goal scored, so the player is being sensible first by looking to
hold onto it and secondly by not just attempting the first pass he sees (if
there is one at all). If he loses possession in this situation, it isn’t as
simple as him holding onto the ball too long. If I remember right, in this instance Welbeck
was closed down very quickly by about 3 Swansea players having briefly looked
for a pass only to find nothing on, where he probably would have expected to have team-mates showing for it. So here there's nothing 'too clever' about him trying to keep the ball - he only tries to outsmart the opposition from the point where he's immediately surrounded, a point at which he has to try. At this point even an aimless clearance probably would have cannoned off one of their players such was the intensity of their pressure and their proximity to him. What's more, his attempt to keep the ball through close control
and working some space despite seeming almost impossible is successfully
managed by players every week – for me it’s having confidence in your own
ability and applying your mind to the game rather than trying to be too clever.
And how clever is too clever anyway? As I mentioned earlier, discouraging
players from doing certain things will cause them not to do it, revert to a
safer option and they won’t improve at it. OK, obviously in this case Welbeck isn’t going
to be taking MOTD analysis as advice for his game, but we need to think about a
wider scope here. As a younger player I was far more impressionable and receptive to this
kind of commentary and I doubt I was alone. There must be plenty who take the "advice" and repeat it (I know as a teenager I used to take bullshit
clichés I saw on TV into playing in the school playground or indeed in a proper
competitive match and repeat them there), running the risk of not developing as
broad an understanding of the game as they should. I hate to generalise, but I know a number of managers and coaches at grassroots level who are ardent listeners to football phone-ins and such stuff. Trying my best to sound as unpatronising as possible, they relay this limited idea of the game to their players. From playing at junior level and watching either friends or younger relatives of mine, the number of times I've heard "don't fuck about with it there!" or "that's too casual!" or "if you can't pass it properly there just clear your lines!" and a myriad of similar phrases, could fill a viewing of Modern Times Forever (Google it to get the reference). The reality is that trying to keep the ball all
the time immensely helps you as a footballer. The rule of practice makes
perfect applies here – you’ll lose the ball quite a bit at first, sometimes
even in dangerous areas which occasionally leads to a goal, but as you take
more opportunities to try it you become more adept at it. That’s better than
taking the safest option most of the time, not really trying to cope with more
difficult aspects and then being in a spot of bother when finding yourself in a
tricky situation on the pitch. The sad truth is that losing the ball makes you
look bad as a youngster and you get picked on – nobody wants either of those
things in football. It makes the problem a difficult one to get round.
Elevating this to a top professional level, I
remember watching Match of the Day on the first day of the 2012/13 season too
and seeing analysis of West Brom vs Liverpool, which finished 3-0 to the home
side. It was Liverpool’s first match under new manager Brendan Rodgers and he
clearly planned to implement the same passing philosophy which had served him
so well at Swansea. Clearly such systems don’t happen overnight and take some
getting used to – inevitable teething problems arise when a new manager comes
in and overhauls tactics and systems, meaning early results and performances
often aren’t great and some mistakes are made which seem basic – as the cliché
goes: “a professional footballer shouldn’t be making that sort of error!” – but
it’s really players trying and learning to adapt to a new system, a new
methodology of playing for their football team. In this very game, one West
Brom goal indeed came from Liverpool trying to play out short from the back and
losing possession very close to their own penalty box. Depressingly, in the
post-match analysis (and I think it was Hansen again), the comment on this goal
was something like “basic errors again – he’s just got to get rid of it there
but he gives it away and they go and score.” I was so wound up by this I wanted
to cry myself to sleep, and I was on holiday at the time. I’m sure as
ex-professionals these people have been present when a new manager has come
into the club and changed the team’s approach, with the players struggling with
it early on before getting to grips with it and improving (which is pretty much
what happened with Liverpool last season), and you hardly need to be a
professional to even work that out, hence it irritates me when pundits
consistently come at things like this from the wrong angle.
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