Observing the recent defeats of Spain from both Chile and Holland and also the success of Real Madrid in the Champions league I think it's clear the football is now moving on. If you look at the formation and tactics now used it is all about counter attacking and overloading of the wings using a 3-5-2 formation and successful teams are stepping away from the Barcelona possession based tiki-taka style. In my opinion it's a good think as I found tiki-taka quite monotonous and at times whilst it can be beautiful extremely dull. It will be good for some at St Mary's who used to moan frequently of the sideway passing! My understanding is Koeman at Feyenoord adapted a similar 3-5-2 formation with high pressing counter attacking style play. Do you think this falls into the Southampton Way and we will move away from the 4-2-3-1 style we see so often now and try something new? Are people excited about seeing a new style and do you think we have the personnel to pull it off?
I don't think Tiki-Taka in itself was boring. When Barcelona first burst on the scene under pep it was brilliant to watch. What became boring was the only way clubs found to stop it was the parking of the bus. This lead to some pretty dull smash and grabs like Chelsea winning the champions league. Then the German sides found a way of not only stopping it, but destroying it with this counter attacking style and Arjan Robben. Spain/Barcelona have not evolved or have not been able to adapt and it is the end of an era. As for Saints I can't say we were too tiki-taka as we scored plenty of goals on the counter. I still think there is a need and an advantage to possession football
I thought we played quite exciting football these last two years, if people found that boring then they're probably following the wrong sport (in my opinion). I think saintlyhero has pretty much got it spot on. 2 teams play a football match, if one team is insistent on keeping the football, then surely it is the job of the opposition to win it back. If the opposition allows them to have the ball for 90 minutes with no pressing then it's destined to be a boring match (like a training game), who's fault is it, the team that wants to play with the football or the team that doesn't?
I may be wrong, but what from I've seen Koeman played a 4-5-1 most of the time. The game has evolved slightly, and 3-at-the-back tactics have become a bit more common but often as a plan B (Liverpool), and more teams are playing two up top again, be it a 3-5-2, 4-4-2, or the diamond that Liverpool like to use. Is Koeman taking us down that evolutionary path? I don't think so actually. I think Pochettino is more into these new styles than Koeman is.
Last season we lost quite a few matches to teams who weren't as good as us, such as Sunderland, West Ham, Cardiff etc. These teams played to their strengths but also exploited our inability to change our tactics. This may have been largely down to the thinness of our squad, but a factor was also Mauricio's lack of a Plan B. Ronald Koeman may well change the overall setup of the team, but whatever formation he uses, you can bet your life that sooner or later someone else will find a way through it. In that situation, I just hope he can quickly shift things around on the pitch to counteract the opposition. Last season we had a problem with losing games once we went behind. Next season I would like to see us both holding on to leads, and also coming from behind to snatch victories. If we can do both of those things, we will certainly finish in the top 10, and may well improve on last season's position.
Taken from the Guardian but further reading I found interesting on the subject: People are unhappy. They're unhappy at teams like Bayern Munich who keep the ball, preserving possession and looking to pass opponents into submission, and they're unhappy at teams like Chelsea who defend deep, allow opponents to have the ball and try to pick them off on the break. People, over the past fortnight, have declared themselves bored by – and opposed to – both proactive and reactive football. That's not actually as contradictory as it sounds. We live in an age of extremes. When Barcelona first started to play tiki-taka under Pep Guardiola, they began to achieve unprecedented levels of possession. For the first time probably since Arrigo Sacchi's Milan almost two decades previously, there was a new philosophy about. This wasn't just a minor tweak of positioning, a tendency for one centre-forward to drop slightly deeper, or for the full-backs to push a bit higher. It wasn't a slight change of shape: it was a whole new style. It took the basic tenets of total football to previously unimagined extremes – in part because of an exceptional generation of players many of whom had been schooled in a particularly idiosyncratic style at La Masia, in part because of a visionary coach in Guardiola, and in part because of the changes in the offside law that increased the size of the effective playing area and so permitted smaller, more technical players to flourish. When totaalvoetbal emerged as a term in the Netherlands in the early 70s, the totaal aspect of it was part of a wider movement in Dutch culture, particularly architecture. JB Bakema, one of the theory's prime exponents, argued that all buildings should have individual characteristics but should be designed with their place in the overall environment in mind. The application of the term to football made sense in terms of Bakema – the whole point of it was that players were aware of their positions within the system and were constantly renegotiating it for themselves; but there was also, at least outside of the Netherlands, a more popular resonance. This was total football because everybody, it seems, could do everything: defenders could attack and attackers could defend. Although tiki-taka shared with total football the high defensive line, the interchanging of positions and the sense that the game could be controlled through possession, its characteristics were far from total: everything became sublimated to the pass. The centre-forward became a false nine because that enhanced fluidity of movement and created additional angles to keep the ball moving; the full-backs played higher up the pitch than ever before; midfielders were selected in defence for their passing ability from deep; even the goalkeeper had to be able to play the ball out from the back. For a time, football seemed not to know how to react. When Chelsea came so close to eliminating Barça in the Champions League semi-final in 2009, the assumption was that the great physicality of Premier League teams could brush them aside, yet Manchester United never got anywhere near them in the final. The semi-final the following year, and the defeat to José Mourinho's Internazionale, came as a watershed. Yes, Inter were fortunate in some respects, but at the same time there were spells in the second leg of that tie – spells the significance of which perhaps wasn't fully recognised at the time – in which Barça were reduced to endless sideways passing, bereft of imagination and verticality. Yes, Barça missed chances they would usually have taken and, yes, Bojan Krkic's late strike should have counted, but the lesson was there: radical possession football could be defeated by radical non-possession football. In his controversial biography, Diego Torres explained the code Mourinho came up with at Real Madrid for handling games against high-class teams, particularly away from home: "1) The game is won by the team who commits fewer errors. 2) Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition. 3) Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, it's better to encourage their mistakes. 4) Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake. 5) Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake. 6) Whoever has the ball has fear. 7) Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger." That's the theory Mourinho used in the first leg against Atlético and last Sunday against Liverpool. Others, in a more diluted form, have followed: Real Madrid were quite happy to sit deep and absorb pressure against Bayern, both at home and away, capitalising on Bayern's inability to counter the counter (Uefa's technical reports show the number of goals scored from counter-attacks has fallen from 40% in 2005-06 to 27% last season; the increased efficiency of the attack-to-defence transition is one of the great developments of the last decade, something discussed in detail in the quarter-finals issue of Champions magazine) and their haplessness at set-pieces (a persistent flaw in Guardiola sides, perhaps rooted in his insistence on picking defenders who can pass rather than those who can mark and win headers). Mourinho was quite open about his switch to a defensive approach in this spell at Chelsea. "We may have to take a step back in order to be more consistent at the back," he said in December after his side's Capital One Cup quarter-final exit to Sunderland. "It's something I don't want to do, to play more counter-attacking, but I'm giving it serious thought. If I want to win 1-0, I think I can, as I think it's one of the easiest things in football. It's not so difficult, as you don't give players the chance to express themselves." Their next game, nine days later, was the 0-0 draw at Arsenal and a new tone had been set. Against teams prepared to attack Chelsea, the change of approach was hugely effective, but against other counter-attacking sides or teams who prefer to sit deep, it left Chelsea vulnerable to mistakes, misfortune and moments of brilliance from the opposition. As Mourinho himself noted on Sunday after the win at Liverpool, it's one thing to set out defensively, quite another to have the discipline to complete the job. "I am a bit confused what the media thinks about defensive displays," he said. "When a team defends well you call it a defensive display. When a team defends badly and concedes two or three goals you don't consider it a defensive display." Wednesday demonstrated the problem. Eden Hazard's lapse in allowing Juanfran to run beyond him led to Atlético's equaliser and Chelsea were chasing the game. Mourinho brought on a second striker in Samuel Eto'o and, even leaving aside the fact it was his foul that conceded the penalty, the addition of a second striker surrendered midfield. "That made it possible to bring in five midfielders," said Diego Simeone, who brought on Raúl GarcÃa for Adrián López 12 minutes after Eto'o's arrival. "We benefited from that: it left a lot more space for us to control the game." In itself, the notion that possession is dangerous is nothing new. Egil Olsen discovered in the 80s that in the Norwegian league a side was more likely to score before the ball went out of play if the opposing goalkeeper had the ball than its own. What is different is the degree, while the dynamic when, for want of better terms, a Guardiola-ist team meets a Mourinho-ist team, is wholly new. One team is voracious in its appetite for the ball, the other has no interest in it, and the result is that one side can have 75-80% of possession – and this is the crucial part – without ever really being in control of the game. That's a natural part of evolution. A thesis (radical possession) arises, an antithesis (radical non-possession) arises to combat it and at some point a synthesis is achieved that will govern the consensus of how the vast majority of clubs will play for the next few years. That the two extremes are so seemingly unpopular is revealing, less in the preference it suggests on the part of the majority of fans for football with a more traditional narrative of cut and thrust, than in the depth of the hostility. That suggests a potential new influence on the tactics of the future: while most fans quite logically prioritise winning, could it be that the growth in the global, less partisan, audience and the commercial need to appeal to it, leads teams to favour football with a more overt aesthetic appeal? The other oddity in the reaction to Bayern's defeat has been the number of attacks on Guardiola and the assertion that tiki-taka is dead. In five seasons as a manager, Guardiola has won four league titles, two domestics cups (and is in another final), two Champions Leagues and three Club World Cups. Even given the dominance of the present era of superclubs, that is a phenomenal record. But the idea that tiki-taka is over, that Barcelona's defeat to Bayern last season and Bayern's defeat to Real Madrid somehow invalidate an entire philosophy, is to misunderstand the whole nature of tactics. In tactics there are no absolute rights and there aren't many absolute wrongs: there is certainly no magic formula. Tactical theorists aren't like alchemists searching for the quintessence that will explain everything. There is evolution and development in tactical thinking, but everything is contingent on other factors; the same structuralist theory that underpinned Bakema teaches that nothing is not relative. Tiki-taka worked so well at Barcelona in part because of the technical ability of the players, in part because opponents were still adjusting to changes in the offside law and in part because of the intensity of their play. You can get away with a high line and passers rather than defenders in the back line only if there is ferocious pressure on the ball. One of the reasons for Barcelona's slide from the very peak is that they have lost that intensity: stats from Whoscored.com show that Lionel Messi, for instance, has gone from retrieving possession through tackles or interceptions 2.1 times per league game in 2010-11 to 0.6 this season. Bayern were noticeably lacking in zip and zest in both legs against Real Madrid, perhaps because after such a glut of success over the past two seasons their hunger has been dulled, perhaps because they have won the league so easily this season that a certain edge has been lost and perhaps because Guardiola made tactical errors. There are those who have argued that Bayern destroyed tiki-taka in the semi-final last season and that it was therefore an enormous error to try to implement it at Bayern this season. That, though, is to ignore the fact that Bayern last season were a highly proactive, possession-oriented side in pretty much every game other than those against Barcelona: domestically, only Barcelona had more possession in the top five leagues in Europe last season; only Barcelona had more possession in the Champions League group stages last season. In those semi-finals, Jupp Heynckes recognised that Barcelona were better at retaining possession and so set his side up to play reactively, with great success. None of that means tiki-taka is finished as a system. None of that means teams will not continue to try to control games through possession. What does seem to be the case, though, is that the examples of Inter in 2010 and Chelsea, against both Barça and Bayern in 2012, has radicalised the approach of reactive teams when encountering tiki-taka, and that will probably prevent it ever again enjoying the pre-eminence it enjoyed at Barcelona between 2009 and 2011 – just as total football, or at least the version with an aggressively high defensive line, never quite dominated the club game again after the break-up of Ajax after the 1973 European Cup final. It was a specific way of playing for a specific set of players in a specific set of circumstances at a specific time. Its influence was profound, as that of Guardiola's Barcelona was and assuredly will continue to be. Whether that style will ever dominate in the same way again is another issue. Once the evolutionary wheel has turned, it rarely goes back.
I think you have to evolve or you slide back and that's what we are seeing with Spain. It may even be what we see with Spurs next year. Last season was exciting most of the time but occassionally you felt a faster break would more effectively unlock a defence but Saints were clearly instructed to hold the ball up and wait for reinforcements. I think (hope) Koeman will take the possession football that we do so well and add that cutting edge that I thought was lacking. Our players are learning and they will learn faster using different systems and will surely benefit fro a new top class coaching regime.
I just find it sad that Pep gets the credit for simply continuing what Rijkaard started at Barcelona and what Heynckes had already done at Bayern.
Football's evolving all the time, of course. Mauricio Pochettino was, to be fair to him, at the leading edge of that evolution, with a clear vision of how he wanted his teams to play. Hopefully Ronald Koeman will be able to continue the progress we made under his predecessors, and will have ideas of his own about how play the game; maybe even with a little more flexibility than the Argie. Last night a Spurs supporting mate told me he was jealous of our new manager, and thought he was a much better appointment than Pochettino. Let's hope he's right.
Does this not highlight the failings of Saints last year? We played some great possession football, we pressed high and often and this was usually effective. The problem came against teams and managers that were used to this style having played in Europe and knew how to counter it (particularly Jose at Chelsea) and then the lack of a plan B. We did generally play great football and were great to watch, but there was a disturbing lack of end product in too many games. I had a distraught 5 year old son with me at the Cardiff game who just didn't understand how we managed to lose the game, for example, and I'm with him. I wasn't a big Koeman supporter pre appointment, but looking at his innovations over the years, I can only see us improving under him. We have intelligent and hard working players that can adapt to new systems and should be able to work with tactical innovations and changes within games if required. I'm certainly hoping that while we may not be quite as good against the smaller and middle teams, we may be more successful against the big boys. Still, it's all guess work and we'll have to wait and see!
You want to give it a try. I read it on my phone. A very interesting article indeed. Incidentally, those who consider Pochettino to be among the tiki-taka managers are incorrect, in my opinion. Yes, he uses the elements of possession football, but his emphasis was on winning the ball back and striking quickly. The fact that Saints often couldn't do it quickly was because they couldn't find a quick way through. Therefore they would pass the ball around to have a re-group. In effect, they were asking the opposition to switch off. Saints often counter attacked as well. They wouldn't waste time passing in triangles as the purists would do. It was a combination of styles, and it has much more to do with the Chilean style of play than the Spanish. If anything it was a pressing game. And that's a game that is without the ball. It was the element that was decidedly different to other teams in the PL, and it got Saints noticed. The fact that Saints had more possession than most teams just shows how good we were at the press. What we weren't that brilliant at was what to do with the ball once we had it. If anyone, Poch is from the school of Bielsa, not from Guardiola, although they do have elements in common.
I disagree. It didn't become boring because of the opposition. It was always boring watching a player get to the byline. Stop. Pass it back. Then across the field (via 4 players) then to the other byline. Pass it backward. Across the field again. Then back to the goalkeeper. That is not 3 minutes of entertainment. It was boring from the start. The moments of Messi, Iniesta, Xavi goals which happened in the blink of an eye were very entertaining but the other 'efficient' 88 minutes were utter boredom. For a lot of last year I was complaining that Clyne was doing this and not crossing. Think it was the Fulham away game or around that time that he finally crossed a ball and we scored. Drives me mad being so intent on keeping the ball that you let the opposition regroup. The most exciting side I ever watched was Man U when Scholes, Beckham, Giggs etc were at their peak together. That team would constantly attack at the first opportunity. I would guess they had high possession stats too but I bet they had many more times chances created, shots etc. That team was very very entertaining. Shots on and off target are entertainment. An accumulated 40 minutes of each game passing in the central third of the pitch is not entertainment. Might be technically good but it is boring. Personally last season we missed the boat a few times and when our slow approach wasn't working we could've done with changing things even if it was just for a short spell in the match. Maybe Lambert's lack of pace had something to do with it I don't know but I am hoping for a bit more attacking intent. Funnily enough something we all got very used to under Adkins. Now that was entertaining football. lol. Maybe Koeman can do Adkins with better defending??? I'll get my coat.
Question: When you receive possession of the ball and the opposition are already mostly behind the ball and you have tried to get 'in behind them wide' unsuccessfully, what do you do then? Do you check back out and keep passing and probing, trying to create an opening, or do you lump it in the box, creating a 50:50 situation? I agree entirely if it is a break away or that teams must try and get in behind or into shooting positions as quickly as possible; sometimes a defense gets into a good position and shape quickly and you have to work very hard or be very creative to get a chance.
Will be interesting to see if managers like Pep can learn and evolve their style now too......and the likes of Mauricio once High-Press-Bielsa get's old hat. That's surely the real mark of a great manager?
If Clyne or Alves get to the byeline then they should cross it into the box, not turn around and play it back to Davis or Busquets. There were multitudes of times that the cross was on, defender not yet close for the block and the ball was sent backwards. You are simplifying for the sake of it FLT. I am not talking about hoofing it forward at every opportunity. The ball should be worked forward whenever possible but that doesn't mean that it can't be passed around midfield. However the process that Barca used was very often a case of passing for the sake of passing never with an intention of attempting to score. Trying to bore the opposition to sleep. How many times did Giggs or Beckham turn around and pass the ball back to their left / right back or midfielder? They very rarely did. They put it straight into the box and thrilled the crowds with masses of chances per game. Good job with Andy Cole (my namesake BTW. lol) up front. Anyway I'm glad Tiki Taka is now on the wane. Just hope it doesn't sway too far into Mourinho territory which is boring for the opposite reason. I hope it is back to attack, attack, attack whether it be one team doing it or end to end. Which Saints win did you enjoy the most against Man U? The 6-3 goals and shots galore? or the 1-0 backs to the wall Carlton Palmer match?
