by Ruud Gullit
Closed training facilities are the answer to this kind of espionage. That gives managers the opportunity to train undisturbed, without every incident being reported and exaggerated in the press. I was once involved in an altercation with Fabio Capello, my manager at AC Milan. I was really angry and ready to hit him; luckily Frank Rijkaard stopped me. It takes a lot to get me that angry. And, for me, Capello had gone too far. Yet that argument was never made public at the time, because we all recognized that it was against the club’s interests.
Years later, Clarence Seedorf asked me about it—he was playing at Real Madrid and Capello had told them himself in the dressing room. He used what had happened to show how the club’s interests were paramount and no one should ever leak stories to the press.
In every club, there are bound to be arguments between players. Often you never see or hear about them, but if the training ground were open to the public it would be on Twitter in no time and then on all the news sites, and then you’d have another fire to put out. These things distract from what it’s really all about at a professional club: getting a result in the next game.
That’s why major clubs around the world such as FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, Chelsea, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Juventus and many others invite the media in regularly, once a week. The day before a game, they are free to film the players as they kick the ball around for fifteen minutes.
It’s amusing to see the press try to infiltrate closed training sessions of national teams with their cameras—especially in the Netherlands. In England and Italy the media don’t see it as quite the same challenge. Their patriotism grows stronger as the international game approaches, although if things go wrong for the team then the criticism can be unforgiving.
Of course, the media’s job is to try to inform the public and anything secret is simply asking to be investigated. But national coaches have entirely different concerns. They don’t want the opponents learning more than they already know. They want to surprise the other side. That may be the deciding factor that determines the result of the game.
I regularly speak to managers, but they’ll never talk about their tactics and their approach to the next game, or who’s playing where. Why would anyone give away their tactics? That knowledge is exclusively for the managers and the players. And even if the eleven names on the teamsheet are known, you can still surprise your opponent by positional changes and tactical tweaks.
For example, PSV suffered an abysmal 3–1 defeat at home to FC Utrecht in the quarterfinals of the Dutch KNVB Cup. Three days later, Phillip Cocu took his team to Utrecht for a league fixture. To change his team after the previous defeat he switched the right back, Joshua Brenet, for his regular right back, Santiago Arias, a Colombian. Somehow the press got hold of it in advance. It was deemed a logical move. A back for a back, you’d think, which is what FC Utrecht’s manager, Erik ten Hag, thought too.
Cocu kept his lips sealed. He had given Arias a totally different role, not as a right back but as a deep midfielder on the right. Within twenty minutes the game was decided with a goal by Arias and an assist to make it 2–0. Ten Hag and FC Utrecht were completely overwhelmed and never recovered. In short: if you’re going to adjust your tactics, then be certain it counts quickly and make sure of your result before the other side’s manager finds a way to deal with your surprise by substituting or changing a position.
Ideally a manager should be able to work between games in an undisturbed environment. At Feyenoord, my old club, the opposite is true. There the coach, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, has to hope first of all that his players don’t get run over. Feyenoord’s players have to cross a four-lane motorway to get to their training ground. It lies in a delightfully sheltered site, behind a dyke, protected from the wind, although anyone can watch what’s going on at the training ground from the dyke. And that’s just not the way things are done any more.
Milanello, AC Milan’s training complex, was harder to get into than Fort Knox. Even members of your family couldn’t get in without going through reception. Guests were received in a separate area altogether and only in exceptional cases could they watch part of a training session. On a tactical training day, no one was allowed at Milanello.
The coach gets involved
As a coach you’re always looking for ways to surprise your opponents by exploiting their weaknesses and emphasizing your own strengths. If you have a striker who can head the ball then you have to think of ways to feed him as many high balls as possible. If the other side has a left back who doesn’t know how to build an attack then you want that player to be the one who has to start the buildup, and so you mark the right back and the central defenders. Then the left back has to receive the ball, and you let the weakest link wander about a little and eventually the same old mistake will follow, as always.
These tactics need to be discussed in advance, along with the moves your own team will make from the moment you regain possession from the left back’s mistake. That’s the way a manager gets a grip on the game. Often the effectiveness of your tactics depends on the response of the other side’s manager.
If the other side manages to surprise you then you have to assess the situation with lightning speed. What is the danger if I don’t change my formation? Can I correct the situation with a slight adjustment or a positional change? Does their tactical move create an advantage for me somewhere else? How long should I wait before taking action?
A minute can be too long, and a half-hour too short. In other words, it’s not always a rational decision—sometimes it’s a gut reaction. At the same time, your team’s confidence is at stake, and their trust in you as manager and your tactics. It is a complex combination of factors that you have to take into account.
So you have to give yourself time. Sometimes you think: okay, it’s looking reasonably solid, we can carry on like this. Yet I never hesitated to make changes if I thought we would concede a goal if we stuck to the same pattern: a quick substitution of a player who is underperforming can sometimes be called for.
However, most quick substitutions follow an injury or a red card.
Red card
A red card tests the manager’s ability both to improvise and to prepare in advance. Do you have a viable emergency scenario? If you’re left with ten players, you often need to make a tactical adjustment. Many managers take off a striker or an offensive midfielder and bring on a defender or a defensive midfielder between the lines.
In January 2016, the Arsenal defender Per Mertesacker was shown a red card in the eighteenth minute in a game against Chelsea. Four minutes later, the striker Olivier Giroud was taken off in favor of the defender Gabriel Paulista, Theo Walcott moved into the striker’s position and Arsenal continued to play without a winger. Wenger’s first thought was: I need to get my defense sorted. That was more important than the fact that the target man, Giroud, was having a good game. Up front, Wenger went for Walcott’s pace, thinking that if Chelsea played a more attacking style more space would open up at the back—which didn’t happen incidentally.
Wenger’s choice is the standard solution, but what strikes me about this situation is that managers rarely deal with being one player down with a simple positional change. The response is usually to substitute a defender. Arsenal started that game with four midfielders and Chelsea with three. So why not let one of the midfielders—Flamini for example—drop back a line into defense and try to keep your strength in place, in this case the Giroud–Walcott combination.
A week later, Ronald Koeman faced a similar dilemma when Southampton played West Ham United and the defensive midfielder Victor Wanyama was sent off around the fifty-fifth minute. He kept on his target man, Graziano Pellè, and brought off Sadio Mané. The score was 1–0 for Southampton. Pellè can keep the ball up front, which reduced the pressure on the defense and gave the team space despite the relentless West Ham attacks.
There is no definitive answer because pers
pectives always differ, as do the qualities of the players. When one of your players gets sent off you make a choice and hope that it works out. There is no such thing as a wrong decision, because you always have the perfect excuse that with ten against eleven you have more chance of losing than of winning.
That you still have a chance when playing ten against eleven is because a kind of primitive force takes hold of the ten remaining players, making them capable of achieving the impossible, while the eleven tend to put the brakes on.
The star of the team
When Eden Hazard was on top form, his markers would never let him out of their sight for a moment, so Hazard didn’t need to keep up with them. Normally you would expect him to take up his defensive position when the other team had possession, since it’s often only a matter of dropping back ten meters. If his opponent moved up past him then he would use the space and tell the player behind: “Look out, he’s coming. Take over.”
But later in the season Hazard lost his form and defenders would easily pass him: since he failed to move in formation and no longer made the difference in possession, Mourinho eventually replaced him. That can be a tricky situation for a coach; if Hazard didn’t know why he was being substituted or left on the bench, the coach ran the risk of losing him.
Lionel Messi and Neymar are both fantastic players. That is beyond dispute. I’m interested to see how teams playing against FC Barcelona try to shut them out of the game without touching a hair on their heads or confronting them physically.
It’s practically impossible. When these two don’t have the ball they move into position. If you want to cut them out of the game you need to put pressure on the players feeding them. That brings you to Iniesta and Busquets as the principal passers. You need to tie them down. And then you still have to hope and pray that it works. Because if one of your players lets you down, then it’s up to you as coach to intervene immediately.
In Italy I once saw a team play Barcelona in the way Chelsea successfully played them: with a block of four or five players at the back and a second defensive block in midfield and only a single striker and a false striker in front of the two defensive bulwarks. “Go on, do your best!” they challenged their opponents. They even let crosses from the flanks fly in. The widest defenders didn’t pursue the forwards coming down the flanks at all.
For this kind of strategy, with two defensive blocks and no outside defenders, you need a big keeper and tall central defenders with a keen eye for crosses and who are powerful in the air. If the block is in position then there is hardly any way anyone can get through. That Italian manager didn’t care how many crosses sailed in.
Me, with my Dutch background, I would have been worried having to defend against so many crosses. I would have been constantly thinking: get that ball out. For me, as a manager, the risk of exposing the team to danger like that would be too great.
Cutting out the star player
The best way to nullify a specific opponent is to cut off their supply of passes. If that doesn’t work, the next option is physical confrontation. If all your players win their one-on-ones then you’ll win the game. Only I don’t know of any manager who plays one-on-one across the pitch. Sometimes you see pairs of players, but most teams defend by zone these days.
That is what made a player like Frank Lampard so dangerous. He roamed around long enough to lull the other side into a false sense of security and then suddenly he was there in front of the keeper. He never went in a straight line. And you never saw Lampard sprint. Despite the threat, you couldn’t easily put a marker on him. What made it difficult was that he was really a striker playing from midfield.
How do you deal with him as a manager? Analyze his game, shake your players awake and keep them sharp.
At FC Barcelona the pattern is as follows: Messi drops back to midfield. The right and left wingers and the midfielders sprint after him and the defenders pass and wait for Messi’s through ball. Extremely difficult to defend against. Any defender following Messi as he drops back leaves a huge space, which is dangerous as players move forward. As an opponent you’re constantly faced with dilemmas.
Messi’s role at Barcelona before Suárez arrived: Messi drops back from the striker position to make space for other players and to receive the ball, and giving him various options to pass deep.
If players don’t get behind your defense then they won’t be dangerous. Yet you often see that defenders don’t use all the available tricks to block approaching players. You have to meet those sprinters literally with your body. Plant your shoulder in his torso, bring that sprint to a grinding halt. It doesn’t have to be hard or nasty. Just a simple: boom, “Oh, sorry.”
A smart player will hit the ground immediately when stopped like that and start screaming in agony. Sometimes it may lead to a free kick. And it may even cost you a yellow card, but if you want to win and not get shafted then you have to be smart. At first, as a young Dutch player I was amazed at what I saw, but eventually I adapted.
(Un)sporting defense
Soccer is played in different ways in different places. What may be furbo in Italy is cheating in England. The English often consider smart defending unfair. They liked Roy Keane and Bryan Robson, players who ride into battle with their visor up, straightforward, visible, what you see is what you get, and the referee says what’s allowed.
Hard is fine, but not nasty. Aggressive confrontation that is so common in the Premier League isn’t tolerated on the Continent, although I believe that even in England Graeme Souness spent more time suspended than he did playing. With Souness on the pitch everyone was fair game. And yet I would always choose him in my team.
In Spain, Andoni Goikoetxea had a similar reputation when Diego Maradona was playing at Barcelona. A Basque by origin, he was as hard as nails—he broke Maradona’s leg with not a ball in sight, putting Diego out of action for a year.
Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce were also among the best defenders, yet with a completely different style: more open, with greater aptitude for zonal marking. In the one-on-one tussles at corners and free kicks they’re hard but fair, typical products of the English school of soccer.
Claudio Gentile, the Italian who marked Maradona at the 1982 World Cup in Spain, was also hard and had plenty of tricks, although he was not overly dirty. He was a top defender, shrewdly holding on to his opponent, an arm around your body, nudging you out of balance, knuckles in your back, a tickle to your legs, an elbow slightly too high and all kinds of little things—whatever he needed to do to get the job done: cutting out the opponent. He was unique in achieving that without accumulating a stack of cards. A player you would love to have in your team, Gentile never lost control.
Pietro Vierchowod was of a similar ilk. As far as sticking to their mark goes, Gentile and Vierchowod were on a par. I never considered that Italians play nasty. I have a great respect for Italian defenders because I know the culture and the reasons why Italians defend like that. Winning is sacred, and if you don’t concede a goal you can’t lose. It comes from a profound instinct for survival, although in some ways it’s almost comical. Think back to the way Zinedine Zidane fell into Marco Materazzi’s trap in the 2006 World Cup final in Berlin between France and Italy. Zidane was furious, head-butted Materazzi, received a red card and left the pitch.
No one knows exactly what Materazzi said. Whatever it was, he got the result he needed. Although Zidane always seemed cool and never said much on the pitch, Materazzi knew that he had a temper from the time the French star had played at Juventus, where he had exploded with rage at various times. That’s how Italians experience a soccer game.
Argentinians have an even greater instinct for survival. Add to that their technique and tactical insight and you have what is probably the most complete player. Argentinians pull out all the stops and are not afraid of being hard and nasty. They’ll go beyond the acceptable without scruple.
For
example, take Daniel Passarella. He wore the captain’s armband when Argentina became world champions in 1978 and later played in Italy, first for Fiorentina (1982–6) and then for Internazionale (1986–8). He floored me with a vicious and intentional elbow after his teammate Giuseppe Bergomi had failed to stop me heading in from a corner, twice.
Javier Mascherano of FC Barcelona, another Argentinian, is made of similar stuff. He often goes too far, but appears quite innocent. In the replay you can see him stamping his studs onto another player’s leg. Which hurts. Tiny, unpleasant pinpricks. Even a soccer team like Barcelona needs a little of that occasionally. At least someone who bites back. I get a kick out of it. You need a shrewd player like that on your side. He frightens intimidating opponents. Sometimes it’s quite funny the way they carry themselves: the holy innocent.
After the match
Depending on the result and the importance of the game, players may feel happy after the final whistle or not, quite apart from how they fared in the match. After a regular competition game you raise your hand in the air, thank the spectators and go for a shower. You did your job and the next game awaits.
After you win your first Champions League final you’re in a state of euphoria and you only see afterward on television how you reacted. The level of ecstasy reflects the way the goals were scored. Last season, Liverpool players went wild after their 4–3 victory against Borussia Dortmund. The team seemed on the way out: they were 3–1 down in a Europa League quarterfinal at Anfield Road. If you manage to get the winning goal in injury time, against a better side, and a place in the semifinals, then naturally the players are ecstatic: a healthy reaction.
Psychology