The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines

by Michael Cox

  In stoppage time Chelsea doubled their lead, when an awful corner from Liverpool substitute Iago Aspas created a counter-attacking chance. Former Liverpool hero Torres broke forward, then laid the ball sideways, assisting Willian for an open goal. Willian, the man Gerrard had been imploring to join Liverpool the previous summer, had confirmed Liverpool’s most crushing defeat. ‘Congratulations to Chelsea for the win,’ Rodgers said afterwards. ‘They probably came for a draw; we were the side trying to win.’ But that desperately missed the point, of course – if Chelsea had come for the draw, Liverpool should have taken the draw.

  Manchester City won later that day, 2–0 at Crystal Palace, and also the following weekend against Everton, 3–2. It meant, with two games remaining apiece, Manchester City and Liverpool both had 80 points. City, however, had a goal difference advantage of nine.

  On the final Monday night of the campaign Liverpool travelled to Crystal Palace. Gerrard admits feeling depressed in the wake of his Chelsea mistake, and had flown to Monaco for a couple of days – a destination he chose, tellingly, because he’d visited once before and remembered it being completely empty. But his performance against Palace showed little sign of his sorrow. He assisted the opener from a corner, Allen nodding in, then created the second for Sturridge with a typical long diagonal pass from his new deep role. After 55 minutes, Suárez played a classic one-two with Sterling and poked home. 3–0. ‘We were murdering them – I honestly thought we were going to win 6–0,’ Gerrard said afterwards. Suárez, tellingly, raced to collect the ball from the net, taking it quickly back to the halfway line. Liverpool believed they could make up that nine-goal deficit to Manchester City in just two games,. ‘Somehow, that idea of chasing down Manchester City’s superior goal difference seemed possible,’ Suárez later recalled. ‘That was the only thing in our heads: goals, goals, goals … we thought we could actually do it.’

  This isn’t as ludicrous as it seems. Liverpool had won 11 of their previous 12 games, putting six goals past Cardiff, five past Arsenal, and four against both Tottenham and Swansea. Their final-day fixture was at Anfield against Alan Pardew’s Newcastle, who had completely collapsed in the second half of the campaign, losing 11 of their 14 previous matches, 10 of them without scoring. During that sequence they’d been thrashed 4–0 by Tottenham, Southampton and Manchester United, and 3–0 by Sunderland, Chelsea, Everton and Arsenal. They were utterly hopeless. A victory of the margin Liverpool would require – quite possibly double figures – had never occurred before in the Premier League. But then, no side had ever been incentivised to score ten goals. Usually, at 4–0 or 5–0 up, a team switches off and conserves energy, but this would have been the perfect recipe for the biggest-ever Premier League victory: a rampant attacking force, boasting the division’s top two goalscorers, requiring as many as humanly possible in 90 minutes against a team who had completely downed tools. If Liverpool could score four in 20 minutes against league leaders Arsenal, how many could they manage in 90 minutes against a truly shambolic Newcastle side? Liverpool evidently believed they could win big, and it would have made for fascinating viewing.

  We never found out. In Suárez and Liverpool’s desperation to hammer more goals past Palace they left the back door open, conceding three times in the final ten minutes and falling to a disastrous 3–3 draw. Suárez was inconsolable at full-time, despite Gerrard’s best efforts, sobbing with his shirt over his head, making the exceedingly long walk to Selhurst Park’s inconveniently placed corner tunnel with his face hidden from cameras. Liverpool’s chance had gone, and City won their remaining two matches to lift the Premier League title for the second time.

  While a final-day shootout would have been brilliant, Liverpool should have realised that simply ensuring a victory against Crystal Palace was their primary task. This would have put Manchester City under significant pressure, and while City’s remaining fixtures were hardly tricky, at home to Aston Villa and West Ham – the David Cameron double-header – they’d earned a reputation as bottlers. They’d nearly blown their simple final-day match against QPR two years earlier, and had lost the previous year’s FA Cup Final to a relegated Wigan side. Liverpool had let them off the hook.

  Liverpool’s naivety wasn’t about specific tactics but about their wider objectives. They didn’t need to defeat Chelsea, but desperately attempted to. They didn’t need to hammer more goals past Palace, but desperately attempted to. Liverpool had become such a relentless, all-out-attacking side that they couldn’t revert to the style Rodgers initially wanted – the possession football that offered control rather than goals. Ultimately, that cost them the title.

  23

  Pressing Issues

  ‘Our style is to win back the ball as soon as possible – we move our lines forward and play upfield. It may seem like we are running more, but really we are just running in a more organised way.’

  Mauricio Pochettino

  For a couple of years possession football reigned supreme – almost everyone attempted to retain the ball for long periods, and the opposition sat back and waited for their opportunity to play in the same manner. Eventually, however, there was a significant response: the rise of pressing. Rather than sitting back and admiring the opposition’s pretty passing, teams increasingly pushed up and attempted to disrupt it.

  Pressing wasn’t a new tactic. It had been a major feature of Ajax and the Netherlands’ Total Football in the 1970s, and was particularly popularised by Arrigo Sacchi’s brilliant AC Milan side of the late 1980s. There was a significant history of pressing in England, too. While former England manager Graham Taylor was closely associated with long-ball football, his successful Watford side also pressed extremely effectively. ‘Our style was based on pressing the ball wherever it was,’ Taylor said. ‘So even if the opposition right-back had the ball deep in his own half, we still pressed him. We played extremely high-tempo football, which meant we had to be extremely fit.’

  Taylor’s methods were unfairly mocked, but at the time of his death in January 2017 Premier League football was focused upon pressing like never before, albeit in a more intense and collective manner – as outlined by former Arsenal manager George Graham, famous for his insistence on a high defensive line in the late 1980s and early 1990s. ‘A lot of teams are buying into a pressing game as the modern way to play,’ he said. ‘We used to press years ago, believe me, but not collectively to the extent they do it now.’

  Indeed, pressing lent itself naturally to the Premier League. In a footballing culture fixated on hard work, energy and tackling, getting tight to opponents was a dominant feature of Sunday League football, never mind Premier League football, while the cooler temperature made it easier to run constantly in England than in countries with a Mediterranean climate.

  Yet pressing was rarely discussed in the first two decades of the Premier League era. Teams were often praised for their work rate, and energetic forwards were credited for shutting down defenders, but it’s difficult to remember many teams between 1992 and 2012 being genuinely celebrated for their collective pressure upon opponents. In the subsequent five years, however, the tactic became football’s most discussed concept.

  Pressing was another quality repopularised by Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, particularly during their 2010/11 Champions League-winning campaign. The difference between their performances in the two final victories over Manchester United is extraordinary; in 2009 Barça’s forwards retreated to the halfway line, in 2011 they sprinted forward to press relentlessly, preventing United from developing any passing moves. ‘We play in the other team’s half as much as possible,’ explained Guardiola. ‘We’re a horrible team without the ball, so I want us to get it back as soon as possible.’

  English football’s sudden embrace of pressing can be traced back to one specific half of football in April 2010, when Guardiola’s Barcelona travelled to the Emirates for a Champions League quarter-final first leg against Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal. Pre-match discussion concentrated on the meet
ing of two possession-based sides; but whereas Arsenal were simply about retaining possession, Barcelona were equally concerned with disrupting the opposition’s possession, and their first-half performance was a sensational, terrifying example of pressing. Arsenal were absolutely stunned by the ferocity and intensity of Barcelona’s performance, with right-back Daniel Alves pushing up so high that, at one stage, he was shutting down Arsenal left-back Gaël Clichy next to the corner flag. Arsenal had no obvious solution; they were uncomfortable passing through the press, and were unaccustomed to bypassing it by playing long. They continually played into trouble, while Barcelona regained the ball close to the Arsenal goal and could have been 5–0 up by half-time. Only a rare goalkeeping masterclass from Manuel Almunia kept the game goalless at the break.

  Wenger evidently spent his half-time team talk encouraging Arsenal to replicate Barcelona’s press, but this proved unsuccessful. Pressing is about organisation rather than merely energy, and Arsenal attempted to close down Barcelona’s defence in ones and twos rather than as a collective unit. Barcelona played through this half-hearted press easily, and with Arsenal’s defence now playing higher, they knocked two long balls in behind for Zlatan Ibrahimović to score two almost identical goals.

  Arsenal recovered, however. Barcelona were exhausted from their early exertions, and the introduction of the speedy Theo Walcott allowed Wenger’s side to exploit space behind the defence. Walcott got a goal back, before Arsenal captain Cesc Fàbregas won and then scored a penalty against his boyhood club five minutes from time. Incidentally, Fàbregas cracked his right fibula when being fouled by Carles Puyol for the penalty and consequently missed the rest of Arsenal’s campaign – but adrenaline got him through the next minute, and he smashed home the spot-kick with, effectively, a fractured leg. It finished 2–2, but a better summary of Barcelona’s dominance is the amazing 14–2 ‘shots on target’ figure. ‘Last season we won many trophies, but never played away in the Champions League like we did here,’ Guardiola marvelled afterwards. ‘We took the ball and never allowed them to play. It was the best 45 minutes since I became a coach … we’ve given a good image of how football should be played.’ It was telling that Guardiola focused on ‘never allowing Arsenal to play’.

  One coach particularly inspired by Guardiola’s pressing was André Villas-Boas. The Portuguese coach became involved in football in brilliantly poetic fashion – as a 16-year-old Porto fan he was frustrated that his favourite player, Domingos Paciência, had been dropped by manager Bobby Robson. Villas-Boas happened to live in the same apartment block as Robson, so put a letter in his mailbox outlining his objections to Porto’s tactics. Robson, in typically welcoming fashion, invited Villas-Boas around for a cup of tea, and then challenged him to provide analysis of Porto’s next game to illustrate his point. Robson was so impressed by Villas-Boas’s football brain, as he had been by José Mourinho’s, that he appointed him as a trainee coach. Villas-Boas was still at Porto when Mourinho became manager in 2002, becoming his opposition analyst and following him to Chelsea, where he became renowned for the dossiers that defined Mourinho’s first Premier League stint. By 2009 Villas-Boas was a manager in his own right, at Portuguese side Académica, then he became Porto manager in 2010. In his first season he guided them to an unbeaten league campaign, and he went on to win the Europa League with a 1–0 victory over Braga, who were, fatefully, managed by Domingos Paciência, the man who had unwittingly launched Villas-Boas’s coaching career.

  Immediately after that Europa League victory Villas-Boas paid tribute to both Robson and Mourinho, but surprisingly also to Guardiola, whom he’d never met. ‘He is always an inspiration for me because his methodology gets his team playing fantastic football,’ Villas-Boas explained. ‘His quality and philosophy are a template for me every day.’ Perhaps this alerted Roman Abramovich, who had recently sacked Carlo Ancelotti and still yearned for a Chelsea side with a positive identity. Villas-Boas became Chelsea manager at the age of just 34. This was a bold choice, and Villas-Boas didn’t prove particularly popular in English football, often referred to as a ‘laptop manager’ more interested in statistics than man-management.

  Villas-Boas immediately attempted to transfer his Porto template onto Chelsea, with disappointing results. The key ingredients were a 4–3–3 system and an aggressive defensive line, and while Chelsea were accustomed to the former, they struggled significantly with the latter. The team’s defensive line became the major talking point when analysing Villas-Boas’s system, because it was so radically different from the way they had played since Mourinho’s appointment in 2004. Indeed, while Villas-Boas was inevitably referred to as ‘the new Mourinho’, no other Chelsea manager had introduced such a radically different approach from the Mourinho era.

  This aggressive defensive line formed part of Villas-Boas’s ‘high block’, a term previously rarely used in English football, which referred to the outfielders all pushing up and pressuring the opponents in advanced positions. This was a significant development; Villas-Boas was the first Premier League manager since George Graham whose tactics were defined by what the players did without possession rather than with it. Even though Mourinho’s approach was considerably more defensive, his approach was referred to as counter-attacking football, which implicitly acknowledges periods spent without the ball but literally refers to his side’s attacking approach. Now, pundits focused on Chelsea’s approach when the opposition had the ball, although Villas-Boas often emphasised that his team played ‘vertical’ passes – getting the ball forward quickly.

  Although Chelsea compressed the opposition for long periods, their high line was often breached. While this was forgivable against quick players, it was notable that they also struggled against Norwich striker Grant Holt, a rather rotund, old-fashioned centre-forward who was experiencing his first Premier League season having spent his career in the lower leagues. In some matches Chelsea’s approach lacked cohesion; in a 3–1 defeat at Old Trafford, for example, the defence played high up the pitch but the midfield didn’t press properly, which invited through-balls and runners in behind. The most blatant example of the problem was a 5–3 home defeat to Arsenal. Robin van Persie was the hero, grabbing a hat-trick, while the speed of wide forwards Theo Walcott and Gervinho repeatedly exploited the space behind Chelsea’s defence. For Van Persie’s second goal, a slightly wayward Jon Obi Mikel pass towards John Terry forced Chelsea’s captain to turn and sprint back. The Dutchman easily outpaced him, and Terry stumbled helplessly to the floor as Van Persie rounded Petr Čech. That became the defining image of Villas-Boas’s high block.

  Villas-Boas gradually realised that this approach wasn’t suited to Chelsea, and in December used an extremely low block for a pivotal final Champions League group match against Valencia, when he feared a defeat would cost him his job. Chelsea allowed Valencia complete dominance of midfield, enjoying just 31 per cent of possession, but ran out 3–0 winners. It was old-school Chelsea. From that point there were inevitably major questions about the validity of Villas-Boas’s high block, and after a narrow 2–1 victory over Manchester City Villas-Boas was asked what position his defence were supposed to be taking. ‘In the beginning of the game we were trying to find the best position for the block,’ he explained. ‘We set out today in a medium block. They were feeling too much attraction to press their short build-up, and in the first ten minutes we suffered a lot. I think we adjusted that, I think the players felt they had to adjust, so they lowered the lines a little bit, felt comfortable with it, and then they gained the confidence.’

  This sounded suspiciously like the players overruling his tactics and playing deeper than he intended. But Villas-Boas generally returned to the high block, probably with Abramovich’s demands for a positive identity on his mind, and sometimes the consequences were extraordinary. In a 3–1 defeat to Napoli in the Champions League second round, for example, the Neapolitans repeatedly created clear chances when hitting direct passes for speedy left-winger Ezequiel
Lavezzi, who exploited the huge space behind Chelsea right-back Branislav Ivanović.

  Ultimately, Villas-Boas lasted only eight months at Chelsea. Roberto Di Matteo, his former assistant, took Chelsea to the Champions League title that season – with a Mourinho-esque deep block.

  Less than five months after his dismissal, Villas-Boas was back in the Premier League with Tottenham Hotspur, as a replacement for Harry Redknapp – who, coincidentally, had taken Spurs to fourth position, which would have been enough for a Champions League place were it not for Di Matteo’s improbable triumph. Again, Villas-Boas’s emphasis upon pressing was immediately obvious. In Tottenham’s opening match of 2012/13, a 2–1 defeat at Newcastle, Villas-Boas wanted Spurs to press every opponent except the centre-backs, so the Magpies’ defensive duo of Steven Taylor and James Perch finished with pass completion rates of 100 per cent and 98 per cent respectively, while the rest of Newcastle’s side averaged just 77 per cent. This suggested Villas-Boas had adjusted rather than abandoned his high block.

  Generally, though, Spurs pushed up very aggressively. A notable feature was the extraordinarily high starting position of goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, who took the sweeper-keeper role very literally and regularly raced outside his box to produce spectacular headed clearances. Occasionally Spurs were tremendous under Villas-Boas, fired by the sensational Gareth Bale. They recorded their first-ever Premier League victory at Old Trafford in September 2012, winning 3–2, having started by aggressively pressing Paul Scholes and Michael Carrick with the more mobile duo of Moussa Dembélé and Clint Dempsey – although they eventually retreated into an extremely deep defensive block and enjoyed just 26 per cent of possession.