Today I want to talk about how tactics play the part of winning as a football team. Of course, owning good players will help, but if it was just down to good players, we’d see Manchester United steamroller the likes of Wolves, and we would never have trouble against most teams in the league. That doesn’t happen obviously, and therefore I’d like to talk about tactics in football.
Tactics ain’t what they used to be
Go back even 10 years and you’d see a lot of Premier League teams fielding their formation as a 4-4-2. This often suited the pace of the fast game with wingers deployed to attack quickly on the left and right, and with most teams deploying the same formation, it meant it worked well.
However, 4-4-2 doesn’t really cut it anymore. The reason it doesn’t is a migration to what some might call a less risky tactic – 4-5-1 or a variation on it. With 4-5-1 vs 4-4-2, there are invariably battles won and lost in the midfield. Of course, you can argue that there are more strikers, but with 4-4-2 the two strikers are still needing to be linked up via the midfield. If the extra man in the midfield for the opposition takes the ball off you, then it really makes no odds how many strikers you have – you’re not going to get the ball. Unless of course you play long ball, and I’m not sure we’d have many fans wanting to see that under McLeish.
Many fans rued Martin O’Neill’s persistence with 4-4-2, claiming that it was old fashioned and wasn’t working. However, O’Neill’s football often relied on getting the ball out wide to the likes of Stewart Downing, Ashley Young, or James Milner. As the pace of these players was significant enough to allow for fast, counter-attacking style football, this worked. However, it only works to a certain extent.
You see, it’s not ideal to keep getting the ball to the wingers if you can’t retain possession through the middle. At the time, Petrov and Milner were in the middle and, whilst they are good players, they can’t really stack up against three in the middle. Whether that is three in the middle in a 4-5-1, 4-2-3-1, 4-3-3, or any other variation, it means that the team gets outnumbered. Playing against an average team, it can mean problems, but you only have to look at our thrashing by Chelsea under O’Neill to see what three good players can do in the middle against two.
What will the future show?
Anyway, the point I am making with regard to this article is that if you don’t get the tactics right, you can forget about how good your players are if they are outnumbered. Of course good players make for a better situation than bad players, but in the Premier League three average players can take out two good players if they mark effectively and work hard.
So one of the first tasks when Alex McLeish has had a chance to evaluate all of the players at his disposal, as well as buying new ones in, will be to work out what formation we need to play. What formation do you want to see us playing, and which players do you want to see playing in that formation?
Formations play a large part in the game, and a good one can mean beating teams who have better players than you. After all, how else can bottom half teams beat Manchester United?
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