by Ruud Gullit
But did the course of play tell the real story? To me, Chelsea looked more dominant than Liverpool, even though the Blues had less of the ball in that first half. Chelsea let Liverpool do what they wanted and refused to panic: come on, attack if you like, our defense can deal with anything you have. That was the attitude Chelsea radiated. Sticking to their defensive formation, Chelsea waited remarkably calmly, their organization airtight, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. And the moment came. The moment Gerrard lost his balance and Demba Ba scored.
Conclusion? Brendan Rodgers had made an enormous error of judgment. He and his team should have treated the Chelsea match like a Champions League fixture. It seemingly never crossed Rodgers’s mind that he could or should have played a defensive game. He forgot the crucial bottom line, the minimum he needed from the game: a draw.
If Liverpool had played a compact game and left Chelsea to take the initiative, it would have thrown the Londoners completely. By playing a totally unexpected game—giving the ball away—Rodgers could have confused Chelsea. But he failed to deliver the masterstroke.
Lacking the necessary experience, the unsuspecting Rodgers wandered into Chelsea’s wide-open trap. Rodgers must have nightmares whenever he remembers that game. Liverpool threw away their chance of winning the title, at home, in front of their own fans.
If you have to win in a do-or-die, all-or-nothing game then, of course, go for victory. But if all you need is not to lose, you should never take the risk of throwing caution to the wind and playing only to win. It’s a crucial lesson at the top. Sometimes you have to play a negative game, to be shrewd and smart. Instead Liverpool naively gave away the match and the first chance of regaining the title in twenty-five years. And although their approach had been exceptionally negative, Chelsea went home with three points.
In short: Chelsea had allowed Liverpool to think they were dominating. A fata morgana.
A clear message
The greatest first tackle of a game, ever, was by Roy Keane in the World Cup qualifier between Ireland and the Netherlands on September 1, 2001. In the first minute he sent Marc Overmars flying with a merciless tackle into his ankles from the back. Helmut Krug blew his whistle, but the German referee kept his red card in his pocket, and didn’t even show a yellow. The tone was set; the first blow struck. The intention was clear; the Irish had declared: you’re getting nothing here today!
Referees often overlook infringements in the first minutes of the match since they are afraid of overusing their yellow and red cards. They have to be careful how they dish out the first slap on the wrist. A nice side effect is that a foul like that often leads to some kind of retaliation. And then all you have to do is roll over in pain and groan a little, and wham! Yellow for the other side.
Influencing the referee is a vital aspect of the game. Refs try to be objective robots, but of course they are only human. Sometimes you see players get away with all sorts of infringements. Xabi Alonso (Liverpool, Real Madrid and Bayern) is the best: he almost always gets away with fouls, and these are often crucial. He goes too far sometimes, but he’s annoying and irritating rather than unacceptable or dirty.
In my time at AC Milan it was Franco Baresi who often got away with it. He would stand there looking sheepish. Baresi wasn’t nasty, but he could be a hard player sometimes. Especially when we played Internazionale and he faced Jürgen Klinsmann, thundering up to him time and again. Baresi would give the German striker a knock or two, just to be rid of him.
Getting involved
Whether a player is in top form or not isn’t something you can judge from his expression or attitude, whether his shoulders are drooping or he’s dragging his feet on the pitch. That kind of thing is too general to interpret.
You have to concentrate on aspects relating to soccer, which everyone can see but not everyone pays attention to. Is his first touch good or bad? Is he offering to take the ball? Is he hesitating what to do next? Is he prepared to play the ball forward or is he avoiding taking risks? Does he need to touch the ball a second time to place it where he wants it, or does he receive, play and move on? Players who aren’t really involved in the game become increasingly insecure and tend to lose the ball unnecessarily or just avoid contact.
The power of goals
The first goal is not always decisive. It all depends on your reaction. And that response depends on the circumstances and the moment in the game.
As a manager I never let a quick goal (whether for my side or against us) confuse me. If you go a goal down, there’s still plenty of opportunity to correct the score; and if you go a goal up, the other side has oceans of time to make up the difference. After an early goal, whether as a manager in the dug-out or as a player on the pitch, I approached the game as if the score were still 0–0, not 1–0 or 0–1. At that point it is still too early to draw conclusions or to make dramatic changes and bring on substitutes. Perhaps a minor adjustment in the formation, but only if the other side is employing different tactics from what you anticipated.
A goal in the closing stages of a game can change everything, even though things may still go either way. If you score near the end and take the lead, then you can expect the other side to collapse, physically and mentally. It’s basic psychology: you get a goal and then you think—right, we’ve got what we wanted.
Actually, the opposite often happens. The other side suddenly gets a shot of adrenaline, a sort of primitive instinct drives them to make up the deficit. On the pitch they pick up the second ball more often, and they play a little faster, tougher and harder than you do. And although you’re ahead, suddenly you’re the weaker side and if they score an equalizer . . .
Sometimes the game takes a different course: a team falls behind after a late goal and pulls out all the stops to equalize; in the unbridled sprint to draw level, players forget their place in the organization, so that a quick counterattack may result in their conceding yet another goal.
The fact remains that a goal in the last fifteen minutes is often followed by another—an equalizer. As the final whistle approaches, panic sets in. Balls are kicked away blindly, the strikers are no longer accessible or are no longer in position because they’re helping to defend, or they’re spread out too widely. Often when the ball is kicked upfield it is hard to win back. In the dying minutes, teams, even experienced teams, can find themselves in serious trouble.
To steer a game like that to a satisfactory conclusion you need a couple of smart players in the team. Players who know how to provoke a foul, or commit one, how to dive in the corner, fake an injury, waste time with a corner or a free kick, or pretend that a coin struck them on the head. Italians were past masters: anything to win. The English consider it cheating; others don’t.
Managers can do little from the touchline. A traditional last-minute substitution is an option, or minor changes to dot the i’s while treating an injury. Yet it’s hard to speak to the players at this point, especially in a stadium with 60,000 fans shouting wildly. The manager has to rely on one or two key players to keep things under control and to guide the team through the difficult final minutes. A John Terry for example, or Roy Keane, or Franco Baresi.
Dominating the game
My advantage as an analyst is that I used to play at the highest level and in different positions. Someone who has played as a striker can tell a lot about a team’s defense, and can talk about how a forward is performing. I also played in midfield. With my experience I understand what’s happening since I can empathize with a particular player’s role.
As an analyst I begin by assessing the relative strengths of the two clubs. Then as the game progresses I wonder what a team or a manager actually wants. What is their intention? Their strategy? What is the better side going to do to translate its superior strength into goals? What are the players actually doing on the pitch? Are they going for the jugular? Do they want a quick goal? What are the underdogs doing about it? W
hat is the real difference in strength between the teams?
Dominating the game is the buzz phrase in soccer at the moment. It’s a twenty-first-century thing. When I was a player we never used to talk about dominance or dominating a game. I see it as a term that describes a team making its intentions clear to the public. An empty term really, because it says nothing about whether you leave the ground a winner, or a loser even. It doesn’t say whether you attacked or defended. It suggests attack, but that’s not necessarily the case. Think back to that dramatic game between Liverpool and Chelsea in 2014. Liverpool thought they were dominating, which they seemed to be for a long while, but as soon as the façade cracked they disintegrated.
At Manchester United, Louis van Gaal was often criticized for his emphasis on dominating play. He was constantly claiming that his team had played such a dominant game. He always had a list of percentages at the ready: how much more possession United had enjoyed than the other team. But even 60, 70 percent possession doesn’t guarantee that you win the game, as Van Gaal found out in the Premier League. When United played Ronald Koeman’s Southampton, they easily had 65 percent possession, yet still lost 1–0. It was painful. Ronald Koeman and Van Gaal are compatriots, but hardly best friends.
In defense of his strategy and choice of players, Van Gaal explained to the assembled press yet again how they had dominated possession. In England they laughed, and quite rightly.
Dominating the game often goes hand-in-hand with the concept of positional play. Another holy grail, certainly in the Netherlands. But, like dominance, positional play is no guarantee that a team will win.
The most important thing is to create opportunities and to score. The best chance of winning is to move forward as fast as possible with players who can weave between the lines—between defense and midfield and between midfield and attack—and make themselves available to take the ball while at the same time someone else moves in deep to open up the defense.
With today’s video systems and analytical software it is increasingly difficult for attacking teams to surprise their opponents. Every team’s attacking strategies have been studied thoroughly with video analysis. A normal attack pattern—passing to the deepest player, who sends the ball to an approaching player who passes to a third player, who goes in deep—need not present a club at the highest level with any problems.
Anyway, it’s easier to defend than to attack, since you are tightly organized and the slightest contact with the ball can disrupt the whole attacking buildup. An organized defense should be refined and perfected to the ultimate degree so that it functions even if the players aren’t the best. Only really talented individuals on the attacking side can get through a well-organized defense.
FC Barcelona are by definition dominant, on or off the ball. With players like theirs, opponents are not likely to be tempted to try to dominate a game; Barcelona players have such a surplus of individual talent that they have to dominate play. Teams facing Barcelona have to play poker to win. It rarely works, but the two teams that managed to do this went on to win the Champions League: Internazionale in 2010 and Chelsea in 2012.
When a dominant team is at the top of its game, dispatching a weaker opponent usually presents little problem. The first priority is to ensure that the game isn’t left to chance. A dominant team should aim to get a 1–0 or 2–0 lead as soon as possible. Then they can turn down the heat and meanwhile look for a third goal. And then freewheel through the rest of the match.
This was the game plan at AC Milan from the moment we kicked off. For Italians it was a revolutionary concept. At that time, 1–0 was a sacred dogma in Italy. Almost every team, wherever it stood in the league, knew how to defend a minimal lead down to the final whistle. Keeping the back tightly shut had been raised to an art form.
Yet to me, coming from the Netherlands, focusing on defense like that seemed unnecessarily stressful. Each time I felt like we were tempting fate. I didn’t like it at all. In those first games at AC Milan I continued looking for goals even after we had our 1–0 advantage. I wanted to make sure of victory with a second or third goal, which drove Arrigo Sacchi crazy: he would run up and down the touchline: go back, lock the game up!
In the end we managed to shake off the Italian orthodoxy at AC Milan. Chasing goals became our new tactic and we started looking for opportunities to increase our lead and to guarantee the points. After that strategy had succeeded a few times, the players began to realize that you didn’t need to bolt the door and wait after going ahead 1-0; you could decide matches long before the final whistle. And, either way, it was better for your heart.
At first, Sacchi hesitated; eventually, however, on January 17, 1988, he changed his mind. It was at a home match against Como at the San Siro. Mauro Tassotti got sent off in the nineteenth minute. Unprecedented. It never happened so early in the game in Italy. A huge advantage for Como, everyone thought, especially Como. Eleven against ten, with over an hour to go: those three points were in the bag! Como did the worst thing possible: they came forward.
In the first place, Como were totally unused to attacking, since they were always struggling against attacks themselves. And we were extra sharp because we knew that there were only ten of us to do the job. With fewer players, we found ourselves swimming in the kind of space no team ever had in Serie A. AC Milan’s ten ran rings around Como’s eleven and after ninety minutes it was 5–0. That was when Sacchi realized that attack is the best defense and that it pays to go forward, even with ten, and especially if you already have the lead. That was how we won the Italian championship in my first season at AC Milan and two years later the European Cup.
Counterattacking
If you have the quality to play dominating soccer, then in my opinion you have to be able to counterattack. Leicester City combined the best of both worlds in the 2015/16 season like no other Premier League club. Their Italian manager, Claudio Ranieri, molded an airtight defense and sent his superfast striker Jamie Vardy to wander the open spaces between the lines of the opposing side, backed by the architect Riyad Mahrez. On paper many of those opponents were better than Leicester City. Far into the season, other clubs continued to rely on their presumed superiority and acted accordingly: arrogant, haughty, self-important. Meanwhile, Leicester City profited. Time and again.
The club, especially the manager and his players, proved that it was possible to come a long way with a solid defensive organization, a little aggression, a couple of superquick forwards and one creative player. Even in the world’s greatest competition, as they like to call the Premier League. Every time, the big clubs walked into the same Leicester City trap. The trick was to let the other side think it was dominating the game, and was therefore better.
Having underestimated Leicester, opposing teams came in attacking, testing the team’s defense, its weakest link, or so they supposed. It was exactly what Leicester City’s defenders wanted. They weren’t hanging around their own penalty area without a reason. There they felt nice and safe, with little space behind them to defend. Which gave Vardy, Mahrez, Danny Drinkwater and N’Golo Kanté all the space they needed to play their favorite counter-game, dodging between the opponents’ lines. That was how even Manchester City, who played in an extremely dominant style at home, suffered a humiliating 3–1 defeat.
No other Premier League manager got as much out of his players that season as Ranieri. And that is what counts when you’re coaching. If you can manage that and still lose then you know you were up against a quality team. And the other thing is, you have to go down fighting to the last.
Often a side will appear to dominate because it seems to have the ball most of the time. Yet appearances can be deceptive: possession isn’t the same as winning. Often a team will allow the other side to keep the ball because it’s harder for players to create options when they are forced into a confined space and easier for the team without the ball to react when they have all that extra space.
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In the old days, Arsenal were above all a good counterattacking team. In their best years, with David Seaman, Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Patrick Vieira, Emmanuel Petit and Thierry Henry forming the axis, they had more quality than Leicester City in 2016. Arsenal could reach the other side of the pitch with three passes. Their system was tailor-made for Henry, whose speed made him the ideal striker to spearhead the attack. Arsenal used to be known as boring, but soon lost that epithet in this period, thanks to the brilliant virtuosity of Bergkamp, the determination of Adams, Keown, Petit and Vieira, and the pace and killer instinct of Henry.
I suspect that after a while Arsène Wenger fell in love with Barcelona’s game. Too much in love. I reckon he wanted Arsenal to play in Barça’s style and to rise to the same level as the Catalans, what he called the new soccer. Laudable, but risky. It seems to me that Wenger went out and bought players specifically to realize his plan to play in that style.
Yet he forgot one simple rule: Barcelona are Barcelona and Arsenal are Arsenal. It is useless to compare two teams; creating a copy of another team is bound to fail. So Arsenal got stuck halfway and Wenger never managed to duplicate Barcelona’s style of soccer. It is naive to imagine that buying the same kind of players allows you to play the same kind of soccer. After all, the difference between the style of play in the Premier League and the Primera División is vast. You can’t compare it. English soccer is robust and physical, with lots of movement; in Spain they play technical tiki-taka soccer based on a positional game.