by Bournemouth started it. They had achieved a certain reputation for their kicks last season, scoring, for example, in the 10th second at Arsenal after a clearance where they charged down the left and then attacked down the right. This time, at Old Trafford, the kick-out was much simpler, it was hit back and, as two men were driving down the right, the ball was swept out to that side. He was overhit. Neither of the hunters had any chance to get there and Sergio Reguilón, Manchester United’s left back, let a goal kick go.
The instinct was to think it was a waste, to wonder why Bournemouth gave the ball so freely. Given the care they gave their kickers last season, why so careless? It seemed an odd omission for a coach as respected and seemingly meticulous as Andoni Iraola to have abandoned a ploy that Gary O’Neil had worked on. United then took the kick in the goal, with a short hand to André Onana followed by a mild panic (that wasn’t a losing tactic against Liverpool last week; that’s just what they always do), and went into Bournemouth press, immediately coming under. pressure.
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And that’s when the truth dawned: the goal kick was a deliberate tactic – or at least it was taken into account; after Antoine Semenyo beat Reguilón to set up a crossing chance, that was good too – because a goal kick came from the opposition to represent a chance, at least when the opposition are as uneasy playing out from the back as United . This is the third age of football, in which the old certainties have melted away and nothing is as it seems.
For more than a century, football was a game of territory. Goalkeeper kicked it long. When a defender won the ball, their first thought was to clear it. The starters used to punt the ball into the corner for a winger to chase, with the strong possibility that the opposition would be forced to throw into a dangerous area. You didn’t have to be a long-ball fundamentalist like Charles Reep or Charles Hughes to say that the further the ball was from your back, the safer you were.
The ball 100 yards from the opposition goal is now considered more valuable than not 30 yards from their goal.
The mindset was so entrenched that only in 2019 was the condition that a goal kick must be left out of the area before another player was used. Hardly anyone played out from behind, so it didn’t occur to anyone that it was much easier to pressure the team that took the kick to wait for the ball to leave the box to touch down do it a second time.
The language of football reflects much of the terminology taken from old forms of warfare: teams are “camped” in their opponents’ half, “siege” their goal, and the defenders “dig in”, often in “rear-guard actions”. “. Sky commentator Gary Weaver is obsessed with castles. Everything is couched in terms of protecting or seizing territory.
There were exceptions, but they were rare and controversial. Herbert Chapman was experimenting with counter-attacking when he was appointed player-manager of Northampton in 1907. When he won the FA Cup with Huddersfield in 1922, he was criticized by the FA in a vague letter which expressed his hope “There will be no such thing. conduct in any future final engagement”. Karl Rappan developed a type of sweep system with Servette in the 40’s and then, in the 50’s and 60’s, the golden age of catenaccio in Italy.
But from the mid-60s, two other types of football were emerging. Valeriy Lobanovskyi developed a hostel in Kyiv. In West Germany football took over. And in the Netherlands the two were combined in Total Football. This was a classic case of dialectic development: the Italian elite liked to play without the ball so their rivals had to work out how to play better with the ball.
As pitches and equipment improved so that the first contact could be taken safely, and as the economics of the increasingly stratified game focused, 75% of the ball would regularly at the best possession teams, such as Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona. This was the Cruyffian variation of “if the ball is in their half they can’t hurt us”; “if we have the ball, they can’t score”.
Football had become a game not of territory but of possession. Short back kicks are now the default as the ball 100 yards from the opposition goal is considered more valuable than not 30 yards from the opposition goal.
It has largely been a reaction over the past decade to the absolute dominance of possession that Guardiola’s model inspired, and has largely involved pressing harder or more effectively. Two they want the ball, we they have to work out better ways to win him back. The conflicts between Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp were a regular expression of that dynamic. Both have evolved, Guardiola becoming more direct, and Klopp depleting heavy metal football into something more possession based.
What’s happening now feels harder to categorize (you can say it’s new). The old division of territory against property is no longer sufficient. Evolution is not just a cyclical thing: every revolution does not bring us back to where we were because we know what went before – the model is not a circular model but a helical one.
We are familiar with pressure, and it becomes a new area of conflict, especially as data analysis increases in sophistication. Brighton’s Roberto De Zerbi tries to encourage the press to pull his opponent forward to hit the remaining space. On Monday, Leicester’s Enzo Maresca scored an increasingly familiar goal, with a counter-attack from a Birmingham corner. Bournemouth’s Iraola recognizes that a goal kick is an opportunity for the opposition to regain possession and start a transition. Teams that take set plays now find themselves in possession, and still somehow vulnerable as a result.
Strength is weakness and weakness is strength. After territory and possession, the third age of football is a confusing, false place. The data took us through the looking glass, where nothing is quite as it seems.
