I, Robot

by Peter Crouch

  It can be hard to fight the fashion police. Arrigo Sacchi’s sensational Milan team of the late 1980s and early 1990s lined up in 4–4–2. A lot of flair teams down the years have done. Play that way now, in a far funkier era, and it’s seen as an asterisk against your name. ‘He’s a good manager but …’ It can be harder still to remember that fashions come and fashions go. When I did my coaching badges I looked at research that indicted that 90 per cent of teams at major tournaments – World Cups, European Championships – play the same way. The formation might look slightly different but it resolves itself into the same patterns. Even when you think you are radical, you are often just reshaping what has come before.

  I felt at times with Liverpool that Rafa Benítez – a man who could have a tactics-off with Pulis and emerge bloodied yet victorious – could occasionally become too obsessed with formations. Harry Redknapp believed it was players first. Five-a-sides in training, one little sentence as you ran out onto the pitch for a big match – ‘Go out there and be brilliant.’ It gave you such confidence. There was a system there, but if Luka Modrić wanted to go all mazy and beat two men, someone would fill in behind him. At Liverpool we had Gerrard and Xabi Alonso in midfield, a rock-solid defence of Sami Hyypiä, Jamie Carragher and Pepe Reina, yet we’d set up for Wolves at home with two holding midfielders. We would spend the week working on what Wolves were good at rather than thinking, we’re Liverpool, let’s go out and beat them. We would draw some games we had to win.

  There is a huge amount to admire about Rafa. Yet I wondered sometimes if he thought of footballers as static pieces on a chalkboard. We are three-dimensional characters who will not always do what you expect, and those skills need to be nurtured. If you lock great players into rigid formations, you shackle them. You watch the Manchester City teams of Pep Guardiola and at several points in a game you will lose all track of what formation they’re meant to be playing. They’re so fluid that anyone in midfield or attack can slot into any of the other positions and be completely at home. There is the formation at kick-off and there are the limited times before the final whistle when you could genuinely say they were holding that shape.

  It’s not a happy accident. They all know precisely what Guardiola wants from them and where to be to make that happen. You only have to see his agitation on the touchline when he feels one of his players is not carrying out the masterplan. But neither can you deny how effective Rafa’s methods were. In European competitions in particular he got the absolute maximum out of his team. A two-legged Champions League tie is about as tactical an occasion as football can throw at you: how you balance attack and defence home and away with the away goals rule; new players to combat; coping with an atmosphere in the opposition stadium that is far removed from the Premier League norms. Rafa invariably got it right. People at the club will admit privately that the team which won back the European Cup in 2005 was punching considerably above its weight, but who cared in the aftermath of Istanbul?

  Rafa would drill you and drill you. Each player in the team would be told where to pass the ball in a variety of different scenarios. Get it here, knock it there, get it back, go wide. All of it was mapped out. He would even make us practise what do to if the plan broke down. But it could be difficult to take in because training became monotonous. Some of the enjoyment was lost along the way.

  At a game away at Watford, Rafa pushed me out wide left. I’m nobody’s idea of a winger. I understand the requirements but lack the constituent skills. I could not work out why I was there. I was in a grump from the first whistle. And yet I scored two goals and we won 3–0. The manager had seen that the right-back and right-sided centre-half were both smaller than average. He got Gerrard and Finnan to hit me on the diagonal and play off my headers and knock-downs. I hated it and walked off thinking I’d had a stinker, thinking that maybe if we’d just set up the conventional way we could have won 5–0. Selfish and ungrateful. A footballer.

  Managers enjoy the intellectual stimulation that a funky formation brings. They have two great weapons to use: tactics and man-management. If a player defies their chosen formation, if they don’t buy into their system, the player will lose. They will be dropped or sold. If the manager gets it right, particularly with the unconventional, it’s almost their finest hour. I remember how Rafa took off Gerrard in the Merseyside derby of October 2007 and brought on Lucas Leiva for his debut. Our best player for a callow defensive midfielder. In added time Lucas had a shot that Phil Neville handled on the line. We buried the pen to win it 2–1. Rafa just nodded sagely.

  There will always be one player who either does not understand the system or chooses not to. When Xherdan Shaqiri was at Stoke he probably should have been given a completely free role. It would have made the most of his talents and saved the rest of us a lot of grief. Instead he was asked to play on the right hand side of midfield, which brings more singular expectations at Stoke than it does at Inter Milan and Bayern Munich. You have to help out the full-back behind you. You have to cover as well as sparkle. If you let Eden Hazard have a free run at your defence there will be team-mates who want a stern word with you. Shaqiri could be brilliant. He’d set off, dribble past two men, end up on the left wing – and stay on the left wing. Then we would be totally out of shape. Joe Allen would dash over to help the full-back, inadvertently leaving us short in midfield. At least drop in to left midfield, you’d think, so we could all shuffle across. Instead it would take Shaqiri an age to reanimate. We would eventually lump the ball clear and he would be caught offside on the left touchline, as a right winger.

  There is a fine line between being mercurial and just doing what you want. Fans love to see a player beat a man, but if it keeps leaving you exposed, if it is more likely to lead to you conceding a goal than scoring one, it’s the wrong option. People will point out, rightly, that Shaqiri scored eight goals and had seven assists during the 2017–18 season in a team that was relegated from the Premier League. But for eighty-five minutes each weekend he would be making everyone else’s job slightly harder. Resentment grew in the squad, resentment grew with management. Neither system nor player could mesh.

  Because formations matter, because every nuance of the game is now being worked for an advantage, managers take the training from the pitches to the classroom. Each Friday you will be shown video clips of the weekend’s opposition – their general shape and preferred patterns of play, the specifics of the opponent you will be up against. This winger favours this trick first, this midfielder’s default pass under pressure is to this team-mate.

  Most of the time it’s mildly stimulating, even if footballers hate sitting still indoors. It’s the same angles and moments you might watch at home, just clipped up and highlighted. When Fabio Capello was in charge of England, his favourite instead was a helicopter view taken from a camera he had installed on the top of the stand above Wembley. The idea was that you could see the entire team shifting around, see absolutely everything that was going on. The reality was that you could barely make out anything. You would sit there in silence, watching a ninety-minute game slightly edited to bring it down to an hour, and frequently lose track of the where the ball was. You’d miss goals. You’d forget it was England, because it could have been anyone. You’d suddenly see one team moving slowly back into their half en masse and think, oh, I think I’ve just scored.

  It was possibly the most boring way ever invented to watch football. Capello wouldn’t even say anything as we watched – not pausing it to make a point, or standing up to gesture where he wanted a particular player to be. All of us were on classroom chairs, usually after a busy morning running about and a good lunch, desperately trying not to nod off. Capello had managed to take something every single one of us loved – watching football, watching ourselves – and turn it into something we dreaded. Oh look, you’d think idly while shutting one eye to give it a rest. That’s me warming up on the touchline. Looking like a leggy ant.

  It could have been so good. Players migh
t be selfish but they are fascinated by anything that can make them look better. You show a team playing 4–4–2 that they are up against a team with three in midfield and they will understand that they need to drop an extra man in to avoid being overrun when they don’t have the ball, because midfield is where the game is won and lost. Strikers at other Premier League clubs were looking jealously at their counterparts at Liverpool when Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold were both contributing assists in double figures during the 2018–19 season. I look at the struggles Fernando Llorente had at Spurs that season and feel a great wave of sympathy, because he was a fine target man being played in a system that makes him look like a poor man’s Harry Kane. Christian Eriksen and Dele Alli are sensational to play with but they are not about getting wide and swinging crosses in.

  Players will come up with their own shapes. Sometimes they’ll deliberately ignore the careful instructions they have been given, because they don’t see how they could work. It’s like a benign mutiny – you’re deckhands taking over the ship, but you’re saving it from the rocks. At other times you sense it’s wrong but there’s nothing you can do about it. At Stoke, Gary Rowett wanted us to sit off opposition teams when we were at home so we could break on them. The concept was fine but the setting was not. Stoke supporters were used to the Pulis way. They wanted us up in the away team’s faces, chasing them, clambering all over them. Being out-skilled they could accept. Appearing to be out-fought they could not. The same formation with similar players may have worked a treat at another club. At the bet365 Stadium it never could.

  Players see little patterns and ruses that even dedicated fans do not always spot. All formations fundamentally come down to one key aim: drawing the other team out of position so you can exploit the space that’s left. That is it. It’s why teams try to play out now from goalkeeper to full-backs; if you go long from a goal-kick every time, the opposition will always been in their optimum shape. If you can get them to press you high and yet get through them, they cannot then get back into shape as quickly and effectively as they would like.

  It’s why Pep Guardiola sang the praises of Jonny Evans, a defender who some might otherwise have considered too unassuming to attract his attention. Guardiola could see that Evans not only brings the ball out of defence well but tries to attract a couple of opposition players before offloading it. He creates space. He lures you in. It’s why Naby Keïta’s goal after fifteen seconds for Liverpool against Huddersfield in April 2018 looked like a mistake from midfielder Jon Gorenc Stanković but was in fact a beautifully laid trap. The strikers cut off the ball to the centre-backs, who had split wide for the pass. The goalkeeper wanted to play out. Stanković was left alluringly free – until the moment Jonas Lössl passed to him, whereupon Keïta emerged from the shadow of another Huddersfield player at pace to arrive on Stanković as the ball did. A touch, a return pass from Mo Salah, a finish – all planned by Jürgen Klopp, all about luring Huddersfield onto the snare.

  It’s not just a Klopp gegenpress thing. As a striker at Burnley I was told that on goal kicks I should close down one full-back and one of our midfielders would do the same to the centre-back who was most comfortable on the ball. When the ball was then passed out to the other centre-half, wide on one side, we would pen him in – me shutting off the return pass to the keeper, the other striker closing in on the man with the ball. Our whole team was now on one side of the pitch, and while that looks weird from the stands – Lads! There’s a winger over here completely unmarked! – it doesn’t matter and you don’t care, because the only ball out is a sixty-yard diagonal pass. Not many under-pressure panicking centre-halves can make one of those – and even if they do, it’ll be three seconds in the air and another couple of seconds to bring under control, by which time you can shuttle over to close that space down too. There are so many goal kicks in a match that it’s become a big part of the game. Let’s say you’re playing Leicester in 2018–19. Harry Maguire and Jonny Evans love the ball at their feet, so you close down those first two and leave the weakest full-back open, inviting the pass into him by angling your body away. He gets the ball, the winger gets all over his backside, he goes long and hopefully you win it back.

  Every formation has a downside. With an equal number of players on each side, any attempt to overload one area, side or player will inevitably create stresses elsewhere. If you play with three centre-backs and the opposition have one man up top, one of the three is either redundant or has to be comfortable stepping into midfield and playing. Both the left-and the right-sided players need to be comfortable on the ball, because they will have to split to take the ball off the keeper, almost as if they are full-backs in a 4–4–2. We tried it at Stoke, and only Kurt Zouma, who had grown accustomed to its peculiar demands at Chelsea, could make it work. We could not. Either way your wing-backs have to be amazing, capable of bombing up and down all day long. If you play one up top, you need great support breaking on from midfield, otherwise you are isolated and incapacitated.

  Looking forward, I can only see tactics getting more fluid, and it becoming harder to work out formations in real time. Bernardo Silva, Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva, Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sané – they’re not midfielders or wingers or strikers, they’re just forward-thinking players. Sergio Agüero is the only non-defender at Manchester City who you could describe as a traditional striker. Sané and Sterling might have a preferred wing, Sané a little more than Raheem, but they’re all comfortable in all positions. And that’s a mark of the very best sides. You look at them and you’re not sure who is where.

  It works so well because you can’t follow a player who doesn’t have a position. Back in the day, the left-back would size up the right winger and think, he’s my man. David Silva doesn’t line up anywhere. Is he the responsibility of the holding midfielder, the right-back or the centre-half? He’s none of them and all of them. He’s a nightmare, just as the false nine terrifies traditional defenders. They will simultaneously be thinking, ‘I’m not doing anything,’ and ‘Oh dear God there are runners coming at me from everywhere.’

  If I were eighteen again now, rather than in 1999, I could not play as I did twenty years ago. Maybe I would no longer be able to fit in with the Liverpool and Spurs systems as I once did so well. I like to think I could adapt to pure passing teams, but the gradual extinction of crosses make me wonder. I look at the height of today’s strikers – Sterling five foot seven, Agüero five eight, Sadio Mané and Mo Salah both five nine. That’s my legs. My name would have to become an instruction.

  And I look at the English national team, for so long one of the last bastions of 4–4–2, and I see only excitement. A coach who qualified with one formation, switched to another just before his first major tournament and then changed it up again despite making the World Cup semi-finals. Gareth Southgate has got young players happy to play free and floaty, players with the technical ability to slot into any shape they might choose. We could win a biggie. We really could. If only we get the formation right.

  OWN GOALS

  There are moments in football that unite us all. Linesmen falling over. Sprinklers going off before a match and soaking the unsuspecting TV presenter. The club mascot attempting to join a minute’s silence, a giant hammer or combi-boiler trying to bow whatever they have that is closest to a head and look gutted.

  But nothing pleases us more than the own goal. So joyous if it’s not yours, so incomprehensible if it is. A stricken fall-guy, a supporting cast of the angry, baffled and delighted: it’s tragedy and it’s farce combined, a series of unfortunate events that could only be improved by the addition of the Benny Hill music or some cartoon klaxons/saucepans being dropped.

  There are those own goals that cannot be helped – the inadvertent deflection of a shot otherwise going wide, the ones where a defender slides in desperately to prevent a striker getting a tap-in and instead diverts the ball in from a few yards out. These are very much the bottom of the barrel. They’re accidents rath
er than pratfalls, brave attempts that just happened to be a few inches out. As a forward the last-ditch defender one just makes you angry. You think, why didn’t you just leave it? I could have nudged it home from sixteen inches. It’s the same outcome – goal for us – except it would be transformed into an entirely positive experience for all concerned. I’m happy. I’ve scored a goal. You’re happy, because you haven’t.

  It’s not simply the moment the ball enters the net that is so rewarding. It’s the little dramas that play out all around: the little panicky dance a goalkeeper does when he’s come out to take a ball bouncing through, only for his defender to assume he is still safely in his penalty area and head it past him; the expression on the defender’s face when he makes the ideal contact with his head and then looks up to see the goalkeeper going past him and the ball bouncing gently into the net. The blame-game that follows – it’s your fault; no it’s your fault; I gave you a shout; what, in Portuguese?

  Perhaps the peak of this scenario is the actual collision: the goalie clattering into defender, the defender poleaxed, only the ball untouched as it continues its path across the line unmolested by anyone. As an outfield player my sympathies are instinctively with the defender. I’ve been in positions on corners where the keeper has given it the big ‘KEEPER’S!’ shout, just as I’m about the head the ball clear, and I’ve gone through with the header on the basis that it’s better to bang it away now and argue later rather than pulling out and risking calamity. I’ve also experienced that intense five seconds of private grief when you do stretch out and watch in horror as the ball flies backwards and in. It’s the loneliest feeling you’ll ever have on a football pitch: surrounded by team-mates and opposition players, no one wanting to look at you, no one coming over for what seems like an age before the goalie trudges across and gives you a sympathetic if meaty slap on the arse. If you’ve made a different sort of mistake – letting a runner go, sending a pass into touch rather than to feet – you’ll get an immediate bollocking from your fellow players. If you score an own goal you won’t hear a squeak.