Pep Guardiola.

Mostly football good defence has to begin up front

Poor football matches are the result of shoddy attacking coaching, not inadequate rules, writes Michael Hannon.

 

A few weeks ago marked the one-year anniversary of the announcement of the GAA’s television deal with Sky Sports.

It signalled the association’s first foray into the sports world of pay-per-view television. There were numerous arguments put forth at the time from all sides of the debate as to why it was both a positive step for the GAA or a regressive one depending on how you felt.

Truthfully, I was ambiguous enough to the whole thing. I don’t think I have the time to watch any more GAA than I do as is, and where possible I like to take in championship games in the flesh, the reason for this being that you can get a much better view of the game when you’re at it in person.

The camera, unlike the eye, doesn’t have peripheral vision. The camera also tends to focus exclusively on activity that is happening on the ball and one of the most interesting aspects of a game when analysing it is what is happening off the ball.

Who is running where? Who is making space for team-mates? Who is destroying a team move with their inappropriate movement or indeed lack of movement?

I’ve mentioned this before but when Pep Guardiola took over at Barcelona, one of the first things he did was install a camera in the Nou Camp with a wide enough lens to take in the complete playing field without needing to pan left or right.

When it came to analysing games, it meant he could see every single one of the 22 players at the same time. This, for example, is how you watch a game of basketball. All ten players covered by the camera, at one end of the court. You can see everyone.

It has always struck me how Barcelona’s ‘Més que un club’ motto has been interpreted over the years with much fanfare and great significance depending on how their football team is doing, but personally I always thought it should have been more than a football club, and not just more than a club.

FC Barcelona, in fact, field teams in a wide variety of sports, that include Rugby Union, Rugby League, ice hockey and Olympic handball. Quite easily though, after their football team, the next most successful side they field is their professional basketball side who have won the euro league title a total of seven times.

As a man born and bred in Catalonia, Guardiola would have been exposed to numerous other sports through his association with FC Barcelona. It never really surprised me when I heard snippets about Guardiola’s approach to coaching as a lot of what he does, to my eye anyway, has been influenced from his undoubted exposure to basketball.

Recent clips of him ball-handling a football on the sideline during a break in a soccer game like a seasoned basketball point guard, and then shooting it with perfect technique into a mock ring, give credence to this. Indeed, the recent story where he had his current Bayern Munich team play basketball at training, has confirmed it.

The way he set his Barcelona team to press the opposition reminded me, the first time I saw them in operation, of a basketball team running a full court press. A front three, pressing a back four. Despite being out-numbered, they still turned the ball over high up the pitch on numerous occasions to create easy scoring chances.

With rigorous analysis it is amazing how you can get either a system of attack or a system of defence to function at a much higher level. A week ago on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football, Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville spent roughly 20 minutes going through the Manchester derby from the day before.

They broke down the way United were playing under Louis Van Gaal, showing the impact his coaching was having on the manner in which the team were making space for each other when they were attacking and the way they were compacting the playing area when they did not have the ball.

It was a great piece of analysis and to be honest it was something I had hoped we would see, but to date haven’t, from Sky Sports when they entered the GAA market last summer.

Of course, it’s very difficult to do such analysis live, and it’s no surprise that this was coming from Neville and Carragher a full 24 hours after the game. However, during the show Neville made an interesting comment that resonated with my own experience of playing Gaelic games and contrasted with my own experience of playing basketball.

During Neville’s time at Manchester United, and indeed during his time in the England set-up, coaches would spend hours and hours doing defensive drills with the team, showing them how to compact the pitch and how to deny time and space to the opposition.

This, however, didn’t equate with the approach at the other end of the field. You could see Neville being a little reticent about saying this, not wanting to degrade any of the coaches he’s worked with, and without being blasé about it but, the attacking instructions given consisted of no more than, ‘here’s the ball lads, go out and express yourselves, have a go, be creative’.

As far as Neville was concerned, Van Gaal was just as troubled with having an attacking system as a defensive one. He wants a structured approach to being creative and expressive.

Creative approach
It might seem to conflict with our ideas of creativity, but it shouldn’t really. Maybe Einstein was on to something all those years ago when he mused about the art of science and the science of art.

When the last of the English teams were eliminated from the Champions League this year, Neville bemoaned on television the lack of intensity and defensive organisation from the Premier League sides.

Respected Spanish journalist Guillem Balague replied on Twitter saying he respectfully saw the problem as being a lack of offensive preparation. After watching Carragher and Neville disecting the Nanchester derby, it would seem like Neville has since become a convert to this approach.

In Gaelic football, we currently have a situation where some commentators and suporters are routinely talking about changing the rules of the games in order to save it. There might be some worth in doing that but I think things should be let develop a little first.

The mass defensive systems that have come in have created a sort of hysteria among a populous mob of angry Gaels. Jimmy McGuinness is being credited or demonised - depending on your point of view - for its popularity with teams.
One of the things that always interest me when this debate begins is how people fail to grasp a number of things.

McGuinness’s Donegal were one of the most efficient attacking teams the Gaelic football world has ever seen. Their ability to turn posession into shots taken, and shots taken into scores, remains for me, the most impressive aspect of their play, and not their defensive solidity.

Against Dublin in last year’s semi-final they took all bar one shot in the second half from inside 20 metres. Most Junior B teams would be extremely efficient if they too managed to take all their shots from inside 20 metres, so the credit for this has to go down to the offensive coaching of McGuinness.

His Donegal team only ever really committed four to six players forward at any one time. They were routinely out-numbered in the attacking end of the field because they consistently kept players back to maintain the shape of their blanket.

So how is it that they could work the ball so consistently, so high up the pitch, despite being at a numerical disadvanatage? The simple answer - good attacking coaching.

Other sports have been here before, too. For the blanket defence in GAA, read Catenaccio in soccer, the defensive system made famous by the Argentine Helenio Herrera of Inter Milan.

Herrera claimed shortly before his death that the system was more attacking than people remembered, saying “the problem is that most of the people who copied me copied me wrongly. They forgot to include the attacking principles that my Catenaccio included. I had Picchi as a sweeper, yes, but I also had Facchetti, the first full-back to score as many goals as a forward”.

We are seeing something similar in Gaelic football at this very moment; a general lack of specific offensive preparation is making the games less fluid than they should be.

For years, all anyone ever had to do was play quick, go out and express themselves. Proper analysis of offensive preparation like Neville and Carragher engaged with a few Monday nights ago would highlight what’s really going on rather than the hysteria that we routinely get pummeled with.

For me, it’s poor attacking coaching. Or as Neville intimated, no attacking coaching.

So this summer, come on Sky Sports. One year on, let’s see what you have to offer on the debate.

 

 - Follow Michael Hannon on Twitter - @mickeyhannon.