The Big Number Nine has bruised and battered past possession football and that should be celebrated
There is nothing inherently wrong with passing out from defence, provided you have capable players. But tactics evolve and 4-4-2 with a big striker is back.
For years, the way some talk, you could have been forgiven for thinking the only tactic in football was to kick it long for a 6′ 3″ striker to nod down for his partner, a 5′ 6″ nippy player, to score (like that’d be a bad thing).
It wasn’t, of course, but the idea of splitting your centre-backs and the goalkeeper passing it sideways to them and playing it out was largely regarded as suicidal. The one thing kicking it long does is send the ball away from your own goal, and that is much to be desired. As those many goals that are scored these days prove, when players try to play it out but lack the cool head, passing ability and ball control to do it, they cede possession and concede a goal. That doesn’t happen, the thinking goes, if you just kick it long. Of course, you might just lose possession in a different way and the opposition go on to score anyway, but that seemed somehow separate to the kicking it long bit.
Other tactics did exist. Playing it out was done. Nothing is totally new. Not even the recency bias that makes some think it is. Apparently Uruguay played a form of tiki-taka in the 1930 World Cup. Watching Italy beat us playing 5-3-2 in the 1970s was an eye-opener and we all learned what a Libero was and what catenaccio meant. False nine? Cruyff for the Netherlands and the Austrians and Hungarians in the 1934 World Cup. Ruben Amorim didn’t invent his famed 3-4-3, I remember seeing Barcelona under Cruyff play it, which was in itself an adaption of Rinus Michels’ tactics with Ajax, Barcelona and the Netherlands and saw Guardiola playing in a midfield diamond.
Similarly, the ‘high’ press isn’t a fabulous new invention. It was commonly called ‘defending from the front’ and I recall Ian Rush was especially acclaimed for it, chasing down and robbing defenders, playing in a 4-4-1-1.
But, for whatever reason, a multitude of tactical variations became distilled into a belief everything was 4-4-2 until the the greatest league in the world invented something more sophisticated that was worth paying a subscription for. It was subsequently resisted because frankly it was assumed crude and lumpen. The tactic of the Allardyces of the world who didn’t want to change and believed in something that was, in essence, wrong, almost morally so. It seemed to those who knew better, that all the variations and tactical inventions of the past 100 years were ignored and everyone was put in the 4-4-2-old-fashioned bracket if you didn’t play a ‘modern formation’. But if you did, you were intelligent and hip to the new. That was a general, rather narrow-minded assumption from board to terrace to pundit.
Possession football became the newest false prophet and some were wowed by 80% possession stats, over and above the actual score. You’d think old 4-4-2 merchants were condemned to sit on the studio sofas, legs akimbo, stinking of Brut33, bemoaning the lack of respect for English coaches. The truth was knowledge of other systems was widespread. It may surprise some that in the mid-90s England were playing in a Christmas tree formation and sometimes a midfield diamond. Even so, they still weren’t good enough to win anything.
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But it got so ludicrous that players, managers and pundits invented a whole new lexicon of expressions to describe playing it long without saying so. It was now called ‘playing vertically’ and ‘direct’ and even ‘encouraging the opposition press to create space’. Such euphemisms were and still are used for booting it long, when long ball football is decried and deemed as old-fashioned as Joe Bloggs jeans.
But as with everything, yesterday’s appalling old-fashioned clothing is reinvented as today’s groovy new style for the next hipsters off the production line. Suddenly it seems progressive to have two attackers and solid to have a back four protected by a four-strong midfield. Who knew?
The thing that for years no-one was prepared to admit was: it works. If it’s played badly, like any system, it doesn’t, but it has always worked pretty well for Diego Simeone and Jose Mourinho at Inter Milan. Their European victory was simply remarkable, being apparently born of fear of the football. They beat sides full of better ball players and more skilful players. A large crushing tank running over a fancy piece of lace.
And now the 4-4-2 fear, which was and still is to an extent very real, a bit Brexity and is related to being called ‘traditional’ but not in a good way, has subsided a little and the benefits of a rampaging number nine become more obvious. We see the success portable meat grinder Chris Wood is having. Ipswich’s Liam Delap, a player who thunders around the pitch like a cattle-prodded bull is tipped for great things, maybe Harry Kane’s England replacement. Even Pep-ball includes the keeper booting it long for Erling Haaland. Sorry, it’s not booting it long is it? It’s a long pass. Much less aimless.
Possession football had become so silly that teams wouldn’t shoot because it’s a guaranteed way to lose possession. Thankfully, we’ve consigned such ideas to history and trends have progressed through many phases to reach the hybrid systems we see now. But other elements have remained as a common part of the game such as playing it out from the back at all costs. I know why they do it, I see the point, but they are only applicable reasons if the players are consistently good enough to do it.
But it is dawning on some that they are not good enough, regularly enough, to perpetuate the fashion. It’s great if you are, disastrous and amateurish if you’re not. But fear of seeming hopelessly outdated has stopped some playing to their strengths and instead they just highlight their weaknesses. Are we about to see a widespread volte face on the very idea?
Fans always loved long ball football – it is only determined revisionists that claim otherwise. There’s little better than the keeper picking up the ball and kicking it high into a rain-drenched afternoon sky, in an 80-yard arc. It just looks aesthetically great from the stands, there’s the comfort of it being in the keeper’s hands, there’s the excitement as it hurtles into the opposition box, bounces once and is fought for by a gaggle of players. It beats any amount of sideways passing ‘looking for an angle’ which seems positively neutered, in comparison.
Watch an old Wimbledon video when they finished sixth in 1986/87 and even topped the division at one point, to see how great it can be if we let it. It’s football as a military exercise. Irresistible, crushing, adjacent to human rights crimes but not without skill and energy. They perfected the long ball as an artform.
Go to any game, anywhere, professional or amateur and they usually try to play possession football. But an amateur team local to me decided in one game recently to launch it long all the time. Win the ball in their own half, kick it long immediately. Result? They won 7-1. Passy passy didn’t know what to do as the ball repeatedly rained down on their back three. Good luck with your inverted wing backs. They’d never played against this new revolutionary tactic, as a massive mobile prime beef steak bullied his way into the box and nodded it down for a significantly smaller striker to score a hat-trick.
There is nothing better than seeing a big beast running onto a launched ball, defenders bouncing off him, to crack a 20-yarder into the net. Football is not mathematics or geometry for studious intellectuals, though at times you’d struggle to believe it wasn’t the way some go on. The re-emergence of the long ball and the ‘old school’ big number nine is to be embraced as a very modern way forward and is being proven successful, or at least more successful than playing it out when you’ve not got the players to do it. So, as we used to shout, “get some f**kin’ snow on it, son!”
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