by Michael Cox
This arose because of two factors. First, it was effectively a response to the rise of the attacking full-back. The traditional winger’s job was stretching the play and crossing, but as those responsibilities were increasingly covered by the full-backs, wingers needed to provide something different. Besides, attacking full-backs needed space to overlap into, and a wide player drifting in and pulling the opposition full-back inside proved useful.
Second, top teams now played intricate football based around passing combinations. With fewer traditional targetmen – and more centre-forwards who thrived on through-balls – there was less reason for playing wingers who would naturally go wide. Inverted wingers offered more; they could drift inside and overload the midfield zone, they could play through-balls with their stronger foot and – most obviously – they could shoot. This was particularly crucial. Since strikers were expected to do more than simply score goals, that burden needed to be shared around, and wingers had a big responsibility to get onto the scoresheet. The debate was essentially ‘crossing versus through-balls and shooting’, and the latter roles were considered more important in the modern game. The Inter v Bayern Champions League Final demonstrated that top clubs had generally moved away from traditional wingers by this stage, while right-footed Cristiano Ronaldo and left-footed Lionel Messi had become the world’s most revered players by cutting inside onto their strongest foot, before the Argentine switched to a central position.
Most top Premier League sides weren’t set up around crossing, and therefore wingers – either traditional or inverted – weren’t always used. Arsenal fielded natural number 10s like Nasri, Rosický and Andrey Arshavin drifting infield to create, while Chelsea boasted powerful goalscorers like Florent Malouda and Nicolas Anelka. Manchester United were a slight exception, with Antonio Valencia an old-fashioned winger who regularly crossed for Wayne Rooney, but it was notable that Sir Alex Ferguson omitted him from the Champions League quarter-final trip to Bayern Munich in March 2010, explaining that he selected Nani and Park Ji-sung because they had the versatility to play on either flank and could be switched mid-game to give him tactical options. This was another body blow for the traditional, one-dimensional winger.
The second tier of Premier League sides, however, were still very much based around wing play. As well as Tottenham and Fulham, both Everton and Aston Villa – regular challengers for Europa League places – depended heavily upon their wide players for chances.
David Moyes’s Everton, for example, boasted the Premier League’s best left-sided partnership, with South African Steven Pienaar drifting inside to allow Leighton Baines, probably the most dangerous crosser in the division, forward on the overlap. They had a telepathic understanding, and Baines also struck up a good relationship with Australian midfielder Tim Cahill, who was technically limited but among the most effective penalty-box poachers around, and fantastic in the air despite being only five foot ten. Indeed, Everton’s dependence upon width and crossing is reflected by the fact that Moyes fielded both Cahill and Marouane Fellaini, two unusual midfielders whose strength wasn’t silky passing but getting on the end of crosses.
Moyes’s training sessions were often based around creating overloads in wide positions, forming two-against-one or three-against-two situations to outnumber the opposition, and he particularly liked a small-sided drill that involved teams attacking into three mini-goals placed across the width of the pitch. This encouraged players to attack towards a mini-goal down one flank, find opponents blocking the path and then switch play suddenly to the opposite wing. That was Everton’s game plan: switches of play and using the flanks.
Aston Villa, meanwhile, were managed by Martin O’Neill, who had enjoyed success at both Leicester and Celtic with a crossing-based approach, often in a 3–5–2. At Villa he played 4–4–2 or 4–5–1, usually with two good crossers in Stewart Downing and Ashley Young. Although initially deployed on their traditional flanks, both became more dangerous as inverted wingers. Right-footed Young became a top-class performer from the left, where he had a peculiar tendency to cut inside onto his right foot, trick the defender by shaping to go outside on his left, before cutting inside onto his right for a second time. Downing, meanwhile, excelled when moved to the right by O’Neill’s replacement Gérard Houllier, who famously disliked traditional wingers at Liverpool. In 2011 Young and Downing earned major transfers to Manchester United and Liverpool respectively, but found their crossing abilities less valued at bigger clubs.
This newfound emphasis upon inverted wingers meant it was unusual to see a speedy, dangerous left-footer like Bale on the flank in 2010/11. ‘I believe in putting the best players in the position where they feel most comfortable, and Bale is a lightning-quick, left-footed player, so I used him on the left throughout that season,’ Redknapp recalled. ‘The fashion was for right-footed players on the left at the time, like Ashley Young, so they could cut inside and get to goal – but I saw Gareth needed to build confidence, and he felt best playing in his natural position.’
Bale had become a Premier League star in the second half of 2009/10, then turned into a Champions League star in the first half of 2010/11, with two staggering performances against European champions Inter in his left-wing role. The first display came in peculiar circumstances, Spurs finding themselves down to ten men and 4–0 down by half-time in the San Siro. Bale proceeded to launch a one-man fightback with two stunning goals on the run, then sealed his hat-trick to prove that wingers remained a major goal threat when deployed on their traditional flank. All three goals were arrowed into the far corner with his left foot, and each celebrated by nothing more than a gesture for teammates to retrieve the ball and restart the game quickly. Bale terrorised Maicon, then considered the world’s best right-back, who later insisted he was suffering from a 24-hour bug, rendering him unable to cope with Bale’s speed. He did, at least, keep apologising whenever he fouled the Welshman.
It must have been a two-week bug, however, because when the sides reconvened at White Hart Lane Maicon was again destroyed by Bale. Redknapp had happily outlined his strategy before the game. ‘Their two wide men do not really defend,’ he said at a press conference. ‘Inter attack with three forwards and Wesley Sneijder behind, and they have two holding midfielders. The key will be ripping into them on the flanks – we need Bale to get the better of Maicon again.’ That’s exactly what happened, as Bale produced a performance that topped his hat-trick of the previous fortnight. New Inter boss Rafael Benítez’s tactics appeared somewhat naive, as neither right-sided attacker Jonathan Biabiany nor right-centre holding midfielder Javier Zanetti offered Maicon any assistance. Bale didn’t get on the scoresheet, but motored forward and crossed for two tap-ins for Crouch and his replacement, Pavlyuchenko. ‘Inter didn’t really operate with a wide-right midfielder offering protection,’ said an amazed Redknapp. ‘Maicon was hung out to dry.’
It was a curious oversight from Benítez, considering that Bale had been quiet since the San Siro – precisely because domestic opponents had doubled up against him. ‘How to stop Bale’ became the Premier League’s major tactical question. Moyes’s Everton held Tottenham to a 1–1 draw at White Hart Lane, with Bale inefffective as Moyes used two right-backs, with Seamus Coleman just ahead of Phil Neville. ‘It wasn’t only Neville that made it hard for me; he had two or three players helping him,’ Bale observed. ‘The right-winger was right on my toes all the time so I couldn’t get the ball.’ Redknapp eventually instructed Bale to switch flanks, and he played from the right for the first time.
The pattern continued. In a 2–0 defeat at Manchester United, Ferguson instructed Darren Fletcher to sprint across to support right-back Rafael da Silva whenever Bale received possession on the left. Next, Sunderland’s tough-tackling central midfielder Lee Cattermole effectively replicated Fletcher’s role to assist Nedum Onuoha, while Bolton’s right-winger Lee Chung-yong dropped deep to protect Grétar Steinsson – although the Icelandic right-back seemed entirely nonplussed about the Welshman’s t
hreat. ‘I’ve never received so many texts before a game’ said Steinsson. ‘Bale is a fantastic player, but facing him was just the same as facing anyone else. Friday was Bonfire Night, and I just relaxed and had a really good chicken korma.’
Spurs now had a problem. In four Premier League matches since Bale’s incredible San Siro hat-trick all four opponents used two players against him, and the results were clear – Bale had no space to work in and had no assists or goals, with Spurs collecting just two points. ‘It’s what you get in front of you that helps you,’ explained ex-Tottenham right-back Stephen Carr, now captaining Birmingham, who also nullified Bale. ‘I thought I did OK, but I had a lot of help from in front.’
However, Bale provided a fine performance in a 4–2 win over Blackburn, notable because he twice turned home right-wing crosses, the first a near-post header, the second a scruffy poacher’s effort. There was also a classic dribble and cross for Pavlyuchenko’s towering far-post header, but Bale had demonstrated a different side to his game. ‘It has been difficult for me recently when teams have had two players marking me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to find another way to get past them. I did that against Blackburn and I was delighted.’ Even so, this performance was the exception to the rule in 2010/11 – that cross for Pavlyuchenko proved Bale’s only assist in the entire league campaign. He scored nine goals but was rather flattered by his PFA Player of the Year award, in a season without any standout candidates. Nevertheless, Balemania was under way, largely fuelled by those two performances against Inter.
But both Bale and Redknapp recognised that he needed to evolve to exert a consistent influence upon matches, and so in 2011/12 Bale increasingly wandered inside from the left, with mixed results. He’d previously only ever played wide, and had been a regular for just 18 months – at that stage most players are attempting to improve in their primary position, never mind learning an entirely new role because they’re being double-marked.
Playing centrally required a different skill set, and Bale struggled to receive the ball in dangerous zones, with the correct body position to take the ball in his stride. When it worked, however, the results were sometimes spectacular. He scored both goals in a 2–0 victory at Norwich just after Christmas from a free role, the second after an extraordinary dribble from his own half through the centre of the pitch. At the start of the new year Spurs appeared set for a genuine title challenge, but their form – and Bale’s – dipped dramatically, and his final Premier League goal of the campaign came in January. More elaborate positional experiments didn’t work. Away at Everton, Redknapp realised that Moyes had again fielded Coleman and Neville together to stop Bale, so switched him to the right. He was hugely underwhelming, however, and the travelling Tottenham fans chanted ‘Gareth Bale, he plays on the left’ in frustration at his positioning. Spurs eventually slipped to fourth, and were denied a Champions League place when sixth-place Chelsea defeated Bayern Munich in the Champions League Final, taking the final slot – UEFA’s qualification rules having been revised after the Liverpool debacle seven years beforehand. Redknapp was harshly dismissed.
Redknapp’s replacement, André Villas-Boas, outlined his intention to build the side around Bale, and the Welshman’s final campaign at Spurs was intriguing in a tactical sense. Now wearing the number 11 shirt in recognition of his advanced positioning, he started the season on the left with licence to drift inside. But he was most effective in the second half of the campaign, when fielded as the number 10 in a 4–2–3–1. Again, he was allowed to roam with the likes of Lewis Holtby and Gylfi Sigurdsson making reverse runs to ensure Bale’s drifts didn’t undermine Spurs’ shape. He scored 21 league goals that season – none of them penalties – the same number he’d managed in his previous five campaigns combined. When he found the centre crowded, he naturally drifted wide – but rarely to his former home on the left, and instead to the right. From there, he regularly cut inside, and scored stunning goals against both West Brom and Southampton. Then, in his final game for Spurs, against Sunderland, Bale spent the entire second half on the right flank, eternally trying to cut inside and shoot. With a minute of his Spurs career remaining, he finally managed it, collecting the ball in an inside-right position, stopping dead, then shifting the ball inside young substitute Adam Mitchell (who played just three minutes in his Premier League career and found himself the fall-guy in a Bale blockbuster) and firing into the top corner. It was a fitting finale.
Bale’s expertise in cutting inside from the right convinced Real Madrid to make him the world’s most expensive footballer that summer, beating their own record from four years beforehand when they’d signed Cristiano Ronaldo. There was an obvious similarity between them; positionally, they both started as a traditional winger, increasingly drifted into central zones and eventually became an inverted winger. Superstar wingers were now about shooting rather than crossing, and therefore had become even more direct.
Part Seven
Possession
19
The Italian Job
‘To find a clear identity for the team – this is what I was told should be my goal.’
Carlo Ancelotti
In five of Sir Alex Ferguson’s final seven seasons before his retirement in 2013, Manchester United claimed the Premier League title. The exceptions came in 2009/10 and 2011/12, when Chelsea and Manchester City triumphed respectively. There were obvious similarities between the two. Both sides had beaten Manchester United home and away, both sides clinched the title on the final day, and both sides were managed by Italians, Carlo Ancelotti and Roberto Mancini. Italian managers typically valued the importance of controlling matches, traditionally with cagey, defensive football – but increasingly by dominating possession.
While Serie A was no longer Europe’s best league, Italian managers were still considered the most astute tacticians – thoughtful, flexible strategists who viewed football matches like a game of chess, methodically moving their pieces to nullify the opposition’s strengths. There had been precious little Italian influence upon the Premier League, however. Gianluca Vialli lifted the FA Cup with Chelsea in 2000, but was hardly offering Serie A expertise having been suddenly been promoted from player to player-manager, and he relied heavily upon assistant Graham Rix. His successor, Claudio Ranieri, was more typically Italian, being nicknamed ‘the Tinkerman’ for his regular tactical changes, but having coached Napoli and Fiorentina rather than genuine title-challengers he wasn’t considered a world-class manager. Ranieri would later prove himself in the most unexpected manner imaginable, but the arrival of Ancelotti and Mancini in 2009 was the first time that revered Italian coaches had touched down in England. Ancelotti had won the Champions League twice as manager at AC Milan and Mancini had won Serie A three years running at Inter. With four-time Serie A winner Fabio Capello now in charge of the England side, English football suddenly experienced an Italian invasion.
Ancelotti was a hugely respected coach, and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich appointed him for two primary reasons. First, the Russian remained desperate for European success, and Ancelotti had an enviable Champions League record. Second, and more intriguingly, Abramovich was determined for Chelsea to embrace a grander footballing philosophy, and realised Ancelotti’s Milan were considered the classiest footballing side in Europe – until Barcelona appointed Pep Guardiola in 2008 – by accommodating three or four playmakers in their starting XI. ‘I want to find a manager that gives my team an identity,’ Ancelotti recalls Abramovich explaining. ‘When I see Barcelona or Manchester United, I find an identity in the team, but when I watch Chelsea, I cannot.’
That was unsurprising considering Chelsea had worked their way through four coaches – José Mourinho, Avram Grant, Luiz Felipe Scolari and Guus Hiddink – during the previous two seasons, and were a watered-down, individualistic version of Mourinho’s defensive-minded side. Ancelotti promised he would embrace a possession-based approach, and was desperate to sign an old favourite, Milan’s Andrea Pirlo – the most ar
tistic deep-lying playmaker in Europe.
But Abramovich misunderstood Ancelotti. Of all the top-class managers of his generation, Ancelotti was the most player-centric coach, moulding a formation and style around his best footballers. That’s a perfectly reasonable approach, but in an era where coaching ideologies are considered paramount, Ancelotti’s personal philosophy is difficult to define. More than anything he’s an outstanding man-manager, embracing and encouraging star players, with even tempestuous talents like Zlatan Ibrahimović and Cristiano Ronaldo declaring him their favourite coach. But his playmaker-dependent, possession-based Milan side wasn’t really about Ancelotti’s vision, simply a natural consequence of a squad overloaded with number 10s. ‘I was struggling to fit them all into the team and keep them happy,’ Ancelotti admits, ‘but then we stumbled upon a beautiful accident, the Christmas tree formation.’ Ancelotti often favoured that 4–3–2–1 formation, despite the 4–3–1–2 producing better results, because it placated more of Milan’s star players.
His Chelsea dressing room boasted experienced leaders, including Petr Čech, John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba. In typically flexible fashion, Ancelotti consulted them about training patterns and consequently completely changed his coaching style. Previously he had separated technical, physical and tactical sessions, but he discovered that Chelsea’s players preferred combined sessions – technical drills that were also physically demanding. In terms of tactics, Ancelotti attempted to introduce these elements two days before matches, but Chelsea’s players expressed their dissatisfaction, so again Ancelotti adjusted and effectively aligned himself with the approach introduced by Mourinho, looking at tactics the day before a match.
Ancelotti’s Chelsea started 2009/10 in astonishing form, winning 12 of their first 14 matches. Ancelotti used a diamond midfield: Drogba and Nicolas Anelka up front together, Lampard pushed forward to the top of the diamond, Florent Malouda in a roaming, left-of-centre role, with Michael Essien used in either the right-sided or defensive midfield role, and holding midfielder John Obi Mikel or the more forward-thinking Michael Ballack used accordingly. Meanwhile, Ashley Cole and José Bosingwa provided width from full-back. The star performers were Malouda, who embraced his unusual role and produced his most decisive performances in a Chelsea shirt, and Drogba, who crashed in 13 goals in his first 15 matches. Lampard, however, was never comfortable at the top of the diamond, and Anelka appeared marginalised. There were surprise defeats against Aston Villa and Wigan, but Ancelotti’s use of an unusual system – at least in Premier League terms – was justified. That is, until November’s home meeting with Manchester United, a game Chelsea actually won.
