“We have the high line, because we want to have the ball, but in their half. That’s the manager’s plan and I think we’re very comfortable with it.”
It comes straight from the notebook of your nearest sharp-eyed, deep-thinking manager wearing something in fashion but slightly too out there – complete with a budget to make your eyes pop. Watching the defence of a team with the second-lowest spending limit in the division do that, just a few months after promotion, is more than a little disconcerting. Relentlessly flirting with the halfway line, even the neutral’s heart-rate quickens a little. That’s the thing that big teams do, the hardest style to implement, in no small part due to an increased risk of looking foolish.
The line, verbal not defensive, comes from Las Palmas forward Munir El Haddadi. At 28, he has played under 16 managers for 7 different teams – he should really know a thing or two about it. Despite the accepted ideas about how teams with more modest expectations ‘have to’ approach games, there is a growing body of evidence that he is right.
“Having the ball in your own half isn’t good for much. We want to have the ball in their half to be closer to goal, to create chances, and then if we lose it, to press quickly and win it back, and keep it far away from our goal.”
Put in those terms, it really sounds quite simple, but across the world, there are teams playing 15 yards behind where the manager probably imagined when starting out; most people make pragmatic compromises at work. Thundering after your opponents close to their own box, hunting them down, has become the biggest change at the top of the game in the last two decades, and the mode of attack that weakens the knees of tactical obsessives. The
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