The contents of this book were carefully researched. However, all information is supplied without liability. Neither the author nor the publisher will be liable for possible disadvantages or damages resulting from this book.
ANALYZING SUCCESS IN
EUROPEAN CLUB SOCCER
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
More Than 90 Minutes
Maidenhead: Meyer & Meyer Sport (UK) Ltd., 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78255-455-4
All rights reserved, especially the right to copy and distribute, including translation rights. No part of this work may be produced–including by photocopy, microfilm or any other means–processed, stored electronically, copied or distributed in any form whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.
© 2017 by Meyer & Meyer Sport (UK) Ltd.
Aachen, Auckland, Beirut, Cairo, Cape Town, Dubai, Hägendorf, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Manila, New Delhi, Singapore, Sydney, Tehran, Vienna
Member of the World Sports Publishers’ Association (WSPA)
ISBN: 978-1-78255-455-4
Email: info@m-m-sports.com
www.m-m-sports.com
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1:Attackers Who Defend and Defenders Who Attack—Two Very Different Things
Chapter 2:How to Evolve While Staying True to Yourself
Chapter 3:Concerning E(in)volution
Chapter 4:The Formation, Flourishing, and Eclipse of the Manchester City Midfield—Guardiola’s Inheritance
Chapter 5:The Transformations in Barça After the Arrival of Guardiola
Chapter 6:Mourinho’s Real Madrid—Two of a Kind
Chapter 7:Mourinho’s Return to England and the Search for the Right Way
Chapter 8:Louis van Gaal and Brendan Rodgers—The Fruitless Search
Chapter 9:Suffering—The Road to Glory and Making Decisions in Football
REFERENCES
CREDITS
When football entered my life, it didn’t leave space for much else. Even though it didn’t take away, nor ever will, my passion for films, music, and a glass of wine, it became the center of my life, including my very ambitious professional goals.
Getting up every very early Saturdays and Sundays to watch marathons of matches, staying up late during Champions League matchdays to watch three matches, and doing what it takes to watch an important match is a routine that I have kept in the last fifteen years of my life and perhaps will never change.
One night in 2008, I decided it was time to start writing some ideas and concepts I had already been forming in my mind; they had started to pile up, and I was worried they might never become a reality. In the blank sheets of Lilien’s, my partner at the time, school notebook, I wrote out these ideas and began fitting the pieces of a puzzle I ended up completing nine years later after watching thousands of matches and taking notes and making analyses that sometimes prevented me from sleeping.
More Than 90 Minutes has truly been a journey of discovery, improvement, and even joy. Although I sometimes leaned my head against the wall when I couldn’t shape an idea, or I actually wondered if someone would ever be interested in reading what, in my opinion, was a compelling text, I always found a way over the bumps in the road—the rejection every writer experiences with his own manuscript. Sometimes I celebrated as if I had scored a fantastic goal. This book represents the finished product of my journey. Enjoy.
Though I am the sole author of this book, getting the energy and focus to finish this book would have been almost impossible without some monumental people who gave me the motivation to set my sights on my goals and the perseverance needed to achieve them.
To my mother and my father for that unconditional and natural guidance. Now I can confidently highlight it as one of the pillars of my life.
To Lilien for being with me in a very prolific stage of my life and for standing so many “I can’t go with you to visit your family because there are so many matches I have to watch” and for constantly affirming that you only need to wish something to make that dream come true.
To Albe for his immeasurable humility and for letting me watch so many matches, like Maday, Guerman, Rafa, and the Ameijeiras’ guys did.
And most importantly, even though silently and without being able to understand the magnitude of her masterpiece, to Muñi, for making me a better person and for showing the path to dedication and perseverance and how focused we should be when we want to achieve the things that really matter in life, the ones you get after so many years of hard work and keeping your sight relentlessly on the place you want to be.
Football is not an exact science. On many occasions 2+2 does not make four. Nobody is the holder of absolute truth, and it is impossible to find a player, a manager, or a team that has never had to go through a hard time.
In football, you never stop learning. Its wealth is such that in order to continue to be a successful professional, whether on the pitch or on the bench, evolution is a compulsory process. No team, formula, or system has lasted over time and been immune to the cunning of rivals or the decadence which is implicit in any process.
Indeed, that makes it even richer, as there is an infinite number of ways to reach success, just as there is an infinite number of ways to achieve failure. Being coherent, consistent, daring, astute, mentally strong, humble, indefatigable, and brave are the basic ingredients to achieve a long and fruitful career in this art. Only those who are great know how to mix them and make the magic cocktail.
Special note on the text: Throughout the book, the British term, “football,” is used.
Toward the end of his first spell at Chelsea, José Mourinho had produced a side that had gradually become more solid and more compact. This was due in no small part to the arrival of men who helped make his tactical provisions a reality. With Michael Essien and Michael Ballack in the midfield and Didier Drogba as center forward, Mourinho changed his ideas to the point where he played with just one forward, which didn’t go too badly for him because the Ivory Coast striker was able to cope all on his own leading the line.
Signing Andriy Shevchenko seemed to mean Mourinho would be compelled to play with two up front, but the poor form the Ukrainian was in made him stick to 4–4–1–1, with Joe Cole fulfilling a mixed role, although largely with midfield responsibilities.
The great goal-scoring threat of Frank Lampard, not to mention that of Ballack, contributed greatly to the success of that system, as the solidity of the midfield and the colossal defense starring John Terry, Ricardo Carvalho, and Petr Cech meant that Chelsea often only needed one goal to win all three points.
Indeed, it was the arrival of Essien, and subsequently of Ballack, that threatened to undermine Lampard’s great box-to-box prowess.
In the 2003-2004 season, when Chelsea reached the Champions League semi-final, winning at Highbury against the Arsenal Invincibles, Lampard had one of the best seasons of any player that decade.
At that time, the manager was Claudio Ranieri. He allowed Lampard to cover an enormous amount of ground to both recover and distribute the ball, which was key to his fantastic play that year. Ranieri’s Chelsea had a phenomenal season and missed out on winning the league because Arsène Wenger’s Invincibles played football from another planet and were just that—invincible.
Lampard needed that huge area to express himself fully on the pitch. It may seem illogical, but with a smaller area to play in, he would lose some of his impact.
The arrival of Mourinho—who didn’t have an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Ranieri’s Chelsea—and the Abramovich signings, Essien among them, restricted Lampard’s space; he began to lose his place in the midfield and had to start to adapt in order to continue to play a key role.
In several Champions League games in the 2006–2007 season, Mourinho played Makelele, Lampard, Ballack, Essien, Drogba, and Shevchenko. A team that was impossible to get through, but with a midfield so heavily populated with players with similar characteristics that the speed down the wings offered by Arjen Robben and Shaun Wright-Phillips wasn’t exploited. This had the effect of diminishing the usefulness of a player like Lampard, as he played his best football when he had a lot of space around him.
That transformation in Chelsea’s style of play impacted negatively on their own performances because with a less densely populated midfield they won two consecutive league titles, but then they declined sharply. It wasn’t until Carlo Ancelotti’s arrival that they became champions of England again.
A perfect example of how it’s possible to defend with attackers and do it well is the Manchester United-Chelsea game played on January 11, 2009, when Luiz Felipe Scolari hadn’t yet been replaced with Guus Hiddink. On that occasion at Old Trafford, Scolari played John Obi Mikel, Lampard, Ballack, and Deco in midfield, while Ferguson just gave Darren Fletcher the more defensive duties, with Ryan Giggs next to him, Ronaldo and Park Ji-sung on the wings, and Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov up front. Result: Manchester United barely broke a sweat all afternoon, created endless opportunities, and ran out convincing 3-0 winners, marking the start of their final push to displace Chelsea and Liverpool at the top of the league and win their third title in a row.
A few months later in Milan, a similar tactical revolution took place that achieved even greater results. The man behind it, surprisingly enough, was none other than Mourinho himself; the same Mourinho who at Chelsea had decided to increase the number of midfielders and build a football team based on fewer natural attackers had now decided to try a completely different tack.
At the start of the 2009 -2010 season—his second at the San Siro—Mourinho used Samuel Eto’o as a lone striker against Dynamo Kiev in the group stage of the Champions League, which suggested a return to his old Chelsea ways. Fortunately for Inter and for world football, that match ended in a 2-2 draw, and Mourinho realized that formation wouldn’t take him where he wanted to go.
The presence of one of the best forwards in the world such as Eto’o and the tremendous form Diego Milito was in forced Mourinho to be more conventional and put them both up front. When he saw the number of goals that strike pair produced, he kept them as his main offensive weapon, although we may wonder just how carefully he had to consider it.
But the biggest change in Mourinho’s mentality came in the Champions League last sixteen match against Chelsea. If at the same point the previous year against Manchester United he wanted to play chess rather than football and clung to an overly cautious formation, now Mourinho started the first leg with Eto’o, Milito, and another of the new ever-presents, Wesley Sneijder. He surprised half the watching world and showed that you can learn from your knocks and knockouts.
After just three minutes, Inter was up 1- 0; they kept attacking Chelsea and after half-time, with Inter ahead 2-1, he realized that that score line left them vulnerable for the return leg at Stamford Bridge, so after thirteen minutes of the second half he replaced Thiago Motta with Mario Balotelli. In other words, he ended up playing with Sneijder and three forwards.
Although the score didn’t change, that doesn’t detract from the excellent football displayed by Inter or, in particular, the evolution in thinking of the hereto quite rigid Mourinho.
In the return leg in London, he continued with his revolutionary formation and started with Sneijder, Goran Pandev, Milito, and Eto’o. He came out with all guns blazing, forcing Chelsea to go in search of goals but at the same time take great care in defense, things that can’t always be successfully combined. That game showed how football is sometimes like a small blanket; if you cover your feet, your head sticks out, and vice versa.
The pressure on the Chelsea back line was so great that they found it difficult to attack in sufficient numbers to penetrate a very solid Inter defense led by an excellent Lúcio. The game was very even with two well-matched teams. Mourinho knew he was playing against a great team and that there was a real chance of being knocked out, but the best way to leave Stamford Bridge alive was to attack without fear.
And that’s what they did. They attacked their opponent and avoided being attacked. They didn’t concede, and when Carlo Ancelotti decided he needed to make a couple of changes, which weakened his defense, Eto’o scored to decide the tie.
Bad luck for Chelsea; they got a hard draw against a team who played even harder and who lost the tag of European lightweights. Mourinho took Inter Milan to the quarter-final with a masterful display of football, just as Guus Hiddink’s Chelsea had done a year before against Liverpool.
The games against CSKA in the quarter-final allowed him a breather before facing what was to come in the semi-final: Barcelona. Here he produced another shock and qualified for the final and a trophy for which Inter had been yearning since 1965.
In the first leg, played at home, Mourinho kept his ultra-attacking formation and got a scarcely imaginable 3-1 victory, giving him a huge cushion for the return leg. Not many teams in the previous two seasons had managed to win by that score against a Barça who the previous year had won the treble, much less come back from a goal down to do so. In the return leg, Mourinho was about to employ the same starting eleven, but Pandev got injured during the warm-up, so Mourinho decided to use Christian Chivu as left back and move Javier Zanetti into a three-man midfield alongside Thiago Motta and Esteban Cambiasso. He could afford the luxury of doing this because it didn’t suit him to go toe to toe with a Barcelona side who would be going all out for the two goals they needed to reach the final.
After twenty-eight minutes, the game changed dramatically with the unfair dismissal of Motta, and Inter had no choice but to batten down the hatches in their own area to weather the storm.
And they managed it. Barça’s only goal came in the eighty-third minute, and although Bojan Krkić had two golden opportunities to decide the tie—one missed header and another which was disallowed for offside—that second goal never arrived.
When the final whistle went, Mourinho ran toward the pitch and stood before the Camp Nou in one of the most defiant poses ever seen on a football pitch, which was understandable to a point because of the ridiculous red card shown to one of his best players.
In the final, they played a Bayern Munich side who, without being solid or having a clear identity, had done enough to get through the three knockout rounds, though the first two not without a fight. Arjen Robben saved their skins against Fiorentina and Manchester United, and then in the semi-final they came up against an Olympique Lyonnais side who had little to offer for an occasion of that magnitude.
The first Champions League final to be held on a Saturday was a little strange because Inter hadn’t been in one since 1972, and Bayern’s continental reputation had suffered a little, despite having eliminated Manchester United on the way to the final.
While the German team had a very tricky group with Bordeaux and Juventus, and they needed an epic victory in Turin in the last game, in the three knockout rounds they came up against two sides outside the top tier of European football—Fiorentina and Lyon. Quite the opposite was true of Inter, who had to get past two of the favorites to win the competition in the shape of Chelsea and Barça.
The final on May 22 at the Santiago Bernabéu had the additional spice of being a meeting of two old acquaintances from the Camp Nou: the astute Mourinho, who could deal with the abrupt van Gaal and take advantage of his four years in Barcelona, including the season spent there with Bobby Robson.
Despite having gotten through round after round, Bayern showed that they lacked the firepower necessary to go head to head with a tough and well-oiled team such as Inter, who again took to the field with Sneijder and three forwards.
The tremendous goal-scoring form of Diego Milito, who had enjoyed one of the best seasons of any forward in recent years, was an unstoppable weapon against Bayern, who relied on the mobility of Ivica Olić or the genius of Robben, as Ribéry had been foolishly sent off by Roberto Rosetti against Lyon and was ineligible for the final.
What was to become Mourinho’s star lineup in the second half of the season has certain points that stand out for analysis. The most surprising and praiseworthy is that, for the first time in his life, he put three forwards and a number 10 on the field, although in practice Eto’o and Pandev weren’t exactly forwards positionally speaking, but rather hardworking midfielders more focused on marking and bringing the ball forward, and not so much on scoring, as the responsibility for that lay mainly with Diego Milito.
Eto’o and Pandev might point to those four months as the time when they ran most in their lives, but Mourinho’s brilliant tactic of defending with attackers ended up bringing him no less than the treble.
The wit both forwards showed in adapting to their new functions, integrating in the defensive transitions and retaining their offensive threat when the team won the ball back, was a Mourinho masterstroke which, funnily enough, may have stemmed from a “let’s suck it and see” approach, since it had nothing whatever in common with the product he ended up building in his last months at Chelsea.
This doesn’t mean that it’s a model that should be implemented across the board and that anyone who does will end up winning a treble. The success of a football team depends on many factors, but in this case, everything came together: the manager’s daring, his footballers’ flexibility, superb understanding on the pitch, and, as always, the thing which is never missing, luck.
The fact that Inter were concentrating a little more on the Champions League meant they had an unexpected blip in Serie A and temporarily lost the lead to Roma. That stuttering run-in was affected—greatly—by rotation, particularly in defense, where Inter were much more vulnerable when they didn’t play with their two first-choice center backs, Lúcio and Walter Samuel.
The defeat to Catania was the low point of Inter’s collapse in Serie A, where Marco Materazzi made a real fool of himself by chasing Malaca Martínez all around the area like a ten-year-old boy before watching him score into an empty net.
But they had the luck of champions; Giampaolo Pazzini and Sampdoria gave them a hand by beating Roma in the Stadio Olimpico to give them the title. Roma, managed by Ranieri, lacked the solidity a serious title contender needs. A home game—true, against a good team in Sampdoria—with a Roman storm raining down on Storari’s goal but which ended with two goals by Pazzini which Roma, with Totti now on the pitch, had no answer to it.
Inter’s magical year was completed by winning the Coppa Italia in a final Roma might have seen as a chance to make up a little for having allowed the league to escape from their clutches. However, they offered a performance that wasn’t worthy of the quality of players they had, starting with their ineffectiveness as a goal-scoring threat and finishing with the deplorable attitude of Francesco Totti and his kick out at Mario Balotelli.
El Cholo Simeone once said that the second half of a season is usually more difficult for teams fighting for the league title because many of their opponents are more focused on getting a point than on playing.
Without losing their exuberant desire to win every game and perhaps without meaning to, Atlético de Madrid was gradually consumed in Simeone’s existential endeavor in the final months of the 2013-2014 season, the season that not only brought them the Spanish league title, but also snatched the Champions League victory away from them even as they seemed about to savor its sweet taste. Their goal-scoring threat was diminishing all the time, and their center backs became the side’s biggest weapon, both in their own area and in the opposition’s.
Once Diego Costa started to miss games repeatedly because of injury, Simeone adopted an approach fairly similar to that of Mourinho in the first season of his second spell at Chelsea: defend better in order to try and win 1-0. Fairly similar, but not identical.
The Argentine manager didn’t have too much confidence in his other forwards replacing his first-choice center forward and decided to rely on the aerial threat offered by Miranda and Diego Godín from set pieces. Indeed, on several occasions, when Atlético were drawing matches, he took off one of his attackers and put on José Ernesto Sosa to gain more precision when it came to set pieces.
Atlético de Madrid scored three goals only once in their last sixteen games of the season—the second leg of the Champions League semi-final against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge—and two goals on four occasions. In the rest of the eleven matches, they scored once or not at all.
This approach bore fruit as long as their defense was able to keep their opponents out, but when Real Madrid swarmed all over them, they actually ended up giving away their first Champions League title from a corner kick two minutes from time. When Sergio Ramos scored the equalizer in the Champions League final, Atlético didn’t know what to do to score another goal and could only play for time in the hope of getting to penalties. Nothing in life is infallible, even that which seems perfect, and if you limit your resources, you’ll give up the advantage.
But let us rewind a little. The 3-0 defeat against Osasuna in February with David Villa and Adrián in the starting lineup made Simeone see that after being given few opportunities, these two forwards now didn’t respond when he needed them, because they weren’t involved in the side’s footballing dynamic.
Raúl García, in his season on loan, coincidentally at Osasuna, had changed from being a holding midfielder to an attacking midfielder and was very versatile and very consistent. Simeone had been using him like that and had dispensed with the services of Villa, Adrián, and “Cebolla” Rodríguez, three naturally attacking players.
After that defeat in Pamplona, Simeone gradually gave these three forwards more minutes, although it’s also safe to assume that he felt he had to give the number of games Atlético played that season and the physical toll they took.
However, the job of replacing Diego Costa and Arda Turan in the Champions League final was too big for Villa and Adrián, as the rotation which had been forced on them over the season hadn’t given them the experience of starting in a game of this magnitude. He had the raw material, but he hadn’t been able to turn it into a product that was functional in all circumstances.
Simeone learned his lesson. After the “normal” 2014-2015 season, when they finished third in the league behind Barça and Real Madrid and were knocked out of the Champions League by their city rivals, in the 2015-2016 season Atlético were perhaps an even more effective version of themselves when Simeone showed that he’d identified the mistakes he had made two years before.
Now he used more nominal forwards; Griezmann and Torres learned to lead the line together as well as integrating perfectly into the side’s defensive machinery. He didn’t overload the midfield with Raúl Garcíatype players, but instead used wingers like Yannick Ferreira Carrasco, and Saúl Ñíguez and Koke played behind the strikers. He also had the flexibility that Koke could either play higher up the pitch or in a double pivot with Gabi.
His players still didn’t stop running and pressing. They all felt a part of the team’s dynamic, and although there were some who were more regular starters than others, they all gave 100 percent when they came on. If all eleven had to defend, they did so, and they did it well. If they had to defend a one-goal lead, they all worked together, including the center forwards, without the more attack-minded players having to come off.
It wasn’t an entirely defensive setup; Simeone knew that his formation and his players minimized the role luck plays in football, and he trusted in his own strengths. The defense conceded very few goals, and his forwards were capable of scoring goals from anywhere. It was a setup that rewarded sacrifice, and in the vast majority of matches it worked for him.
Simeone managed to get all his players to integrate in the squad and to make everyone feel important. Because it was such a demanding season, at the end of the day he was going to need them all. What could be better, then, than giving each player the right amount of responsibility so that each one understood his role and how to perform it?
Stefan Savić played for Diego Godín in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final against Bayern Munich and had an excellent game. Lucas Hernández played for José María Giménez against Barça in the previous round and played like a real veteran; Atlético didn’t concede any goals and pushed the defending champions aside.
However, Simone still needs to evolve. He continues to fall victim to the dynamic that he drives himself and this consumes him. In the 2016 Champions League final against Real Madrid, he went for a more rigid and less mobile starting lineup, but a one-off game, especially a final, should not be prepared in the same way as a two-legged tie.
Simone stuck to the same formation that had worked against Barça and Bayern earlier in the competition, and it took him forty-five long minutes to change it. He put Augusto Fernández together with Gabi in defensive midfield and left the more attacking midfield areas for Koke and Saúl Ñíguez, who do not have the pace to react quickly to Real Madrid’s vertical and direct style.
In the run-in to the season, particularly in league games, Simeone was often forced to make the same change as he was at the break in that final because Atletico did not feel comfortable the way they were set up. He took off Augusto, pulled Koke back, and put Ferreira Carrasco on the wing to enhance their attacking options.
Real Madrid did not reach the end of that season with any kind of clear sense of identity or great self-confidence, and their patchy performance was evidence of this. This was the moment for Simeone to spring a surprise and release himself from the chains that had been holding him back, but he lacked the clarity to see how things might unfold and be able to take action before it was too late.
While Simeone should not be held 100 percent accountable because of the starting eleven he chose for the final, it is completely unforgivable that he did not exploit the emotional lift provided by the late equalizer to finish Real Madrid off in the last ten minutes. They were against the ropes, praying for the salvation of the full-time whistle, but he kept his substitutes on the bench. Why? It was as if he liked that masochistic game in which suffering and brutality emerged as the protagonists.
Real stayed alive because Atlético allowed them oxygen to breathe, and they ended up making off with the undécima because Simone was not able to release himself, to allow his metamorphosis, instead clinging to just one idea. To his idea.
He felt the setback deeply, and he realized that a large part of the responsibility for the defeat lay with him because immediately after the final he said he was considering whether to continue. It was a very bitter pill to swallow, and it was now so obvious though of course too late to try and change anything. Time will tell whether Simeone is able to escape from his self-imposed cell and find the balance on the other side of the barred windows.
What Mourinho and Simeone did brought them spectacular success and was more coherent, for example, than what Massimiliano Allegri tried to do with Juventus—the Italian champions and Champions League runners-up—in the Champions League 2015-2016 last sixteen return leg at Bayern Munich after a 2-2 draw in Turin.
Allegri played mainly with midfielders and defenders, with Álvaro Morata as a lone striker. They took an early 2-0 lead from two isolated attacks, but they never took a really active position; instead, they kept tight at the back and tried to play on the counter.
In the second half, Juventus made it easy for Bayern to lay siege to their goal because they posed no threat whatsoever in attack. As the saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s what Bayern did, and they ended up winning the tie. Even if the result had been different, that’s not a way worthy of a great team like Juventus to set up in a match against such a powerful opponent.
Allegri learned from his mistakes. The following season, he regularly started with Mario Mandžukić in a lineup that also included Paulo Dybala and Gonzalo Higuaín. Mandžukić was happy to play not as a center forward but farther back on the left, with more midfield responsibility and more involvement in defensive duties. His presence on the pitch allowed Juventus to defend with attackers and in turn to worry opposition defenses because of the number of forwards they needed to defend against. Allegri used these three players in both games against Barça and against Monaco in the Champions League, and they were easily the better team in both ties.
This isn’t the only example of managers and teams who have failed in certain games and been defeated having set up the wrong way on the pitch; the list is very long. That’s why Mourinho and Simeone clearly showed us that it’s much better to defend with attackers than to attack with defenders.
Around the middle of the last decade there seemed to be an increasing need among managers around Europe to play with a sole striker. To a large degree this epidemic was caused by the success achieved by Frank Rijkaard’s Barcelona side, where Samuel Eto’o was the only out-and-out striker, although Ronaldinho and Ludovic Giuly first and Lionel Messi later also served as forwards.
More and more managers jumped on the bandwagon, only to find that its lack of original thought was to lead to failure. While at Barça there clearly wasn’t just one forward, Didier Drogba was the only out-and-out striker in Mourinho’s Chelsea. Joe Cole, a second striker, and Arjen Robben, a natural winger, were his partners in attack, and Mourinho built a team that was increasingly based on the strength of its midfield and on the finishing prowess of Drogba, although Frank Lampard’s goal-scoring contribution was still invaluable.
Mourinho clung to that system and the team’s impoverishment led to his being sacked, although Avram Grant managed to make a slightly better fist of it, righting the ship for the rest of the 2007-2008 season.
Scolari wanted to do the same thing, but his stubbornness and lack of flexibility soon meant he was shown the door at Stamford Bridge.
After his good 2007-2008 season with newly promoted Almería, and faced with the chaos Ronald Koeman had plunged Valencia into with his marginalization of Santiago Cañizares, David Albelda, and Miguel Ángel Angulo, the Valencia board decided to promote Unai Emery to its bench. It was a throw of the dice which in hindsight left Valencia in the same parlous footballing state it had been in the previous season.
Emery, just as Voro had done in the last games of the previous season after Koeman’s sacking, put David Albelda back in midfield, but imposed a completely apathetic playing system.
Despite having Fernando Morientes in the squad, David Villa was the only first-choice forward. Joaquín played as a right winger, and the attack was completed by two men who played in the same position—David Silva and Juan Mata, who ended up getting in each other’s way on the left-hand side. At times Silva was wrongly used in the middle since at that time he didn’t have the skills he has now to play away from the wing. Because of this, Valencia finished outside the Champions League places that year.
Sir Alex Ferguson was one of those who, in response to continual European knockouts, started to change the way he approached difficult games, almost always when he was playing away from home. Faced with the increasing European trend of playing with just one up front, Ferguson realized that the antidote should be drawn from the poison itself.
So one of the last bastions of open, attacking football started not to be in certain games. If the opponent was playing with a 4–3–2–1 formation, or if it was a tough away game, Ferguson started to use the same system, and he got better results. So much so that after the 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 seasons, when Manchester United was knocked out of the Champions League at the last sixteen stage, and the 2005-2006 season when they finished bottom of a group containing Villarreal, Benfica, and Lille, in the next three seasons they reached two finals and were beaten in the semi-final by AC Milan in the other year.
At that time, teams used to approach games in the Premier League with the idea of going toe to toe with the opposition and trying to simply score more goals than them, with less caution and strategy. Obviously every game was worth the same as every other one; but in Europe, if your opponent sets up with a more cautious approach in a two-legged tie, it’s going to be difficult to beat them unless you change your formation in some way, particularly if it’s a strong team. However, there are exceptions; Mourinho’s Inter won the Champions League in 2010, knocking out Chelsea and Barcelona on the way, with Sneijder and three forwards on the pitch, but this is very much the exception rather than the rule.
While Ferguson didn’t make a habit of this practice, at times he did make a mistake deciding when to use it. In the run-in for the 2008-2009 season, after defeat by Liverpool at Old Trafford in the Premier League, the large lead United had enjoyed was whittled down to four potential points (they were one point ahead with a game in hand), and the hardest part of the season was coming up, with the final stretch of the Champions League, the FA Cup, and the league itself.
As well as the enormous quality of its players, one of the greatest strengths Manchester United had was the 4–4–2 Ferguson deployed in nine out of every ten matches. But that season, particularly in the second half of it, the presence of Dimitar Berbatov came to change his approach often, and that affected the Red Devils’ style and power.
The Bulgarian usually started in the more important matches, but this wasn’t proportionate with his displays, and certainly not with those of the man who was relegated to the bench, Carlos Tévez, a player who clicked perfectly with Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, the other two focal points of the United attack.
Tévez responded with fantastic goals on the rare chances he was given, but this wasn’t enough for him to regain the key role he had played the season before.
On Sunday, May 10, he started the game and scored a great goal against Manchester City, but the following Wednesday he returned to the bench against Wigan, while Berbatov wandered around the pitch unnoticed. In the sixtieth minute, with United down 1-0, Tévez came on and within three minutes had scored the equalizer with a back heel out of nothing after a half chance for Carrick.
That was just one of several episodes where Manchester United took almost an hour to get into gear after an unproductive first half that had been dangerous in terms of their ambitions.
The first episode in this saga was the epic match against Aston Villa, where Ronaldo equalized in the eightieth minute and Federico Macheda scored the winner with a spectacular effort in added time, after allowing Martin O’Neill’s team to seize the initiative and go up 2-1.
The second against Tottenham was no less momentous when they scored five goals in the second half having gone in at half-time down 2-0 at home, shaking themselves from a clearly torpid state.
The third was the game already mentioned against Wigan, a team who clearly came out to defend and who found themselves in front through a Hugo Rodallega goal following several slips by Nemanja Vidić. With Ronaldo quiet, Berbatov ineffective, and an excessive slowness in a midfield of Paul Scholes, Anderson, and Carrick, it had to be the latter with an incredible left-foot shot near the end after the Tevez equalizer to leave the league title within reach and finally lift the trophy the following Saturday against Arsenal at Old Trafford.
Perhaps if Ferguson had stuck to the natural 4–4–2 in the matches where he really needed to use it he would have kept the side’s attacking threat and they wouldn’t have had to work so hard against teams who didn’t come close to matching the power of Manchester United.
The 3-0 victory against Chelsea with Fletcher as the only natural midfielder showed that tactical flexibility is the mother of success in football and is the best way to take all three points in an important game. However, you must have faith in the formation that brings you the best results, and in Manchester United’s case, this was the one which had its attack as its first line of defense. Against the opposition of Aston Villa, Spurs, and Wigan, it made no sense to play with three holding midfielders.
Making the most of your greatest strength should always be your biggest priority, but many managers forget that to win games, while not conceding, you do have to score at least once.
In the summer of 2016, in his column in the Telegraph,1 Carlo Ancelotti explained how France and Portugal should prepare for the European Championship final:
When a team reaches the final of one of the great summer tournaments – a World Cup, or a European Championship – the chances are that your players will be exhausted, their minds reeling at what can be accomplished, and as a manager you can only try to keep it simple.
And he added:
The important thing is to focus on the strengths that you have in your own team. Remind the players of the strategy that has seen them through the tournament so well up until that point. Talk about their own qualities and how they can win. You need to give your players confidence and try to make sure they can do all the good things that got them into this position in the first place.