A German referee asked an interesting thing the other day. Our Berlin ‘freizeit’ team SFC Friedrichshain Internazionale had just battled to a 2-4 away victory, defending bravely in the second half after a 3-0 lead was pegged back to 3-2. When our fourth goal came in the last minute from Ryu Voelkel it was a moment of joy and relief. Afterwards, the referee asked our coach Andrew Weber what we needed to improve on next season.
“Our shape in possession, because then we can keep the ball better and close games out.”
We’re a team blessed with hard-working, fast, chaotic players, averaging 3 goals a game in the 19 fixtures so far this season, but conceding 2.2. The 3-0 lead came with aggressive pressing and quick transitions, but as the game wore on, our desire for more of the same left us exposed when we rushed moves and conceded possession. A joke on the way home that we needed to add a bit of rhythmic Coldplay to our thunderous Megadeth.
In Martí Pernau’s in-depth analysis of Barcelona, The Champions Path (Senda de Campeones), he shares something that Johan Cruyff once said to him:
To avoid losing the ball and being caught on the counter-attack, the concept of the third man is useful: throw the ball long and in front of him in a wide area. You avoid risks. Cruyff used to tell me, “when you have the ball, the first thing you have to do is look who is further away from you. He probably has some space in front of him. Normally play to the man closer to you or available, but if the first thing you can do is play long, play long.
This is a beautiful insight from Cruyff, but it’s not a blanket solution. To curb our enthusiasm for swift attacking transitions would be to turn our backs on the bedrock of a transformative season, so the answer needs to be more nuanced. We need to embrace our strengths on the offensive, but develop the ability to switch to a slower build up and maintain the integrity of our shape to close games out.
So it becomes a question of prevention: how can we improve our transitions from attack to defense? The best way, according to the brilliant Hungarian analyst István Beregi, is with a slower build up.
The slow-build up helps the players to occupy their proper positions – to make ball-oriented shifts – in order to cover and control key areas in possession, which are the inside channels and the centre, because that’s where the most counter-attacks go through. To keep a balanced structure the players have to control these zones in front of the box. Although that’s what most team ignore, therefore they concede a lot of counters.
The second advantage of a more controlled build up is that because of more positional integrity, the counter-counter (sometimes called the counterpress) becomes more available. Under Guardiola, Barcelona hunted aggressively in the moments immediately after a player had made a tackle or an interception. They reasoned – correctly – that he was at his most vulnerable, because as a result of the effort he was often unbalanced and had sacrificed his picture of the pitch.
Building slowly, which allows the structure to be balanced, therefore the counterpress is immediately available. pic.twitter.com/dyAIO0c9GW
— István Beregi (@szteveo) April 16, 2016
For the final word here though, we go back to Pernau: “We can talk about a thousand concepts, but what unites a team, what helps players defend, is the right attitude […] It is not about making your team-mate better, but making yourself better.”