Match Day Thread Sunderland AFC v Blackburn Rovers FC – Monday 1st April 2024 - KO 15:00

There were definitely one or two statements and assumptions that he made that I would question.

And I only watched a couple of minutes.

 

I think he makes lots of salient points in his videos, with hindsight of course but valid non the less.

 

I think he makes some good points, but equally I dont find it all correct. But it is all just opinions.

What I would say he always has hindsight on his side. His premise Dodds does not take account of the opposition is likely innacurate in my opinion. Whether he does it well is another question, but he will almost certainly be sat down with analysts looking at strengths and weaknesses. I dont think the reason we lost to Blackburn was because we didnt know how they would be direct or that Szmodics was a danger man. I think we lost because on the day too many of our reliable players were poor. Some even seemed lethargic / knackered.

Everyone knows I am arch defender or coaches. It is a lonely old job and the only one that gets to carry the can. I dont think Dodds is up to the job, but I am not buying the idea he isnt preparing in the way he thinks best. It is a bit of a lazy look at the way the game pans out and then retro-fitted to a way of thinking on behalf of the guy on the video. In my opinion anyway.

Importantly Dodds will have micro analysed the 90 minutes himself and by now will have taken the players through the way it went wrong. I think we saw in his interview he was angry at the players, and rightly so. My guess is they have not executed the game plan Dodds implemented and have at the same time played rubbish. Sometimes it is not always the coaches fault and the players need to share responsibility. I would point the fingers at the players more for the Blackburn game personally, although I do think Dodds made mistakes too, just not as many as the players.

 

Thank you mate, very interesting.

 

Could it be that the lethargy you mention is almost the result of over-coaching....trying to get them to play different roles match by match,only ending up confusing them?

 

As the late, great Bill Shankly once said " Football is a simple game complicated by idiots"

 

I think Dodds has shown a tendency to over complicate things. But I also think professional footballers should be able to adapt to different formations and slightly different approaches. Especially in the current football world.

 

Agree,but some of these players looked lost on Monday and I'm not sure they can all adapt as quickly as we'd like.

 

Maybe. With the exception of Styles (and maybe Bellingham) none were playing out of position really, so they should all have known their roles.

 

Dodds unaware that Szmodics was the danger man , he certainly isn,t reading our posts then. . Seriously mate everyone knows Szmodics is the danger, but he is not alone they have some case hardened characters in that team and they are fighting for survival. They are stronger and fitter than us and that was the main difference , and they were prepared we were not, but the players where not rubbish and I am surprised at you saying that tbh.

 

It could be yes. Too many instructions will cause uncertainty in players in my opinion. They need space in their own thinking once the game started. I have seen young coaches do what you say and bamboozle players.

 

I genuinely though a lot were well below their own level. Everything from simple 10 yard passes going astray, to poor first touches and not tracking runners. Even Clarke when he came on seemed affected by a malaise of some sort. I couldnt believe some of the decisions players like Ekwah or Adil were making in the first half, it was mind boggling to me. Neils touch didnt look assured and he turned into trouble rather than away from it too often. Roberts was miles off I thought and the two centre halves got split too easily.

I look back at the selection and think Rigg and Ba should have been kept in. They would have made us more solid. That is on Dodds for sure. But when players play so poorly after such a good performance previously I am inclined to think it is something other than what has occured on the training pitch. Probably wrong, but I think we will see a reaction next time, from the players themselves as I think they will know.

 

The thing s crying out for a simple , back to basics approach. Tell the players to do the things they’re good at. Defenders get back to defending and keeping clean sheets. . Stop pissing around with backwards and sideways passes and get rid if under pressure. Get that bit right and the rest follows on.

 

An excellent alternative view

 

They may have been playing in the same positions, but being asked to perform different tasks. I'm convinced the main reason for our loss of form is down to an overload of messages,different match by match,which most of them can't absorb quickly enough. Last season we seemed to play the same,attacking style match after match,without paying too much attention to the opposition. If we conceded,we just carried on trying to score more...mostly it worked, sometimes it didn't,but at least the players seemed to know what they were doing. That mindset appears to me to have been lost.

 

I think there's something to be said for playing your own game, definitely. Dodds has chopped and changed system too much (which is partly what I meant when I said he overcomplicates things) which might well be having a negative impact. The coaching staff should be paying attention to their scouts and analysts though which means that players should be getting a certain amount of opponent-specific information each game.

 

I've got to say, I hate it when people use this quote. Partly because I'm pretty certain that the last three words are misattributed to Shankly and what he actually said was far more sensible and far more interesting. Partly because people don't understand what Shankly was really saying. But mainly because people use it when they are trying to denigrate the use of any kind of intellectual thought in football.

When he said it, Shankly was downplaying the kind of football he was playing and maybe having a swipe at people who weren't playing the same way. Even when he arrived at Liverpool, most English teams were still playing a more direct game than the "pass and move" that he implemented at Liverpool. Shankly was a tactician, he did analyse his opponents, and he did change things accordingly. Reducing his influence on the game to a misunderstanding based on something he only half said is criminal, in my opinion.

English football has suffered from the fear of introducing any kind of intellectualisation into it from the very beginning. Even in the 19th century, the Scots had already outstripped us when Queens Park introduced the concept of passing rather than the player who wins the ball dribbling until he's tackled, or scores. It took until the 1930s, when Herbert Chapman replaced with 235 formation with the WM for anything major to happen in English tactics. Then, everyone played the WM until the 60s when we had a but of a reshuffle and introduced a back four. But really, any kind of major change to thought in football didn't happen again until Arsene Wenger pitched up 1996. I believe this fear of intellectualising football is why people don't like hearing about data and are wary of people like Will Still or anyone else who hasn't taken the traditional route to becoming a football manager (Head Coach).

This lack of thought didn't happen in other football cultures. The discussion of football in coffee houses in Austria and Hungary lead to the so called Danubian School and the Austrian Wunderteam of the 1930s and the Hungary team of the 1950s which showed how tactically inept English football was in 1953 and should have won the World Cup in 1954. Its the reason we've only won the World Cup once and why, until we started listening to foreigners, we were a bit of joke.

"Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple." Bill Shankly

 

Cracking post. Love thinking about the history of the game. I have some ideas on how tactics have developed, some similar, some different to what you point out. Opinions really in my case.

I tend to think we put ourselves down in this country when it comes to our thinking about the game. We have produced some world leading coaches in our time, that have fundamentally influenced football, but dont always credit them. Jimmy Hogan played his part in the emergence of the Danubian school for example. More recently Bobby Robson transformed how European tournament football was with Ipswich and then his spells on the continent. Roy Hodgson laid so many foundations in Scandanavian countries too. Go back in time and British coaches have been very influential indeed. Wenger landing had an impact because he got success, but Allardyce was already doing some of the things Wenger was credited with.

When I think about how really clever coaches have been it interests me. Chapman tweaked to the WM in part as a reaction to a change in the offside rule. But he made it work where others couldnt of course. I suspect all formation changes over time have been because of an external change which made coaches adapt something. I have a suspicion that as people got fitter, and I mean football fit, as the game professionalised, then midfielders became possible because they could run further and quicker. Hence less of the back to front play.

I have long believed the development of the game is influenced by culture and society. In Britain we had the benefit of either wide open spaces where running with the ball, or kicking it a long way, was beneficial. Or on the cobbles it would be kick and rush because the surface was so uneven. In Brazil there was no space, unless you were on the beach. In the Favellas it was tiny pitches and 3v3 games. Futsal was born there. These things are what creates footballers and it is footballers that formations are designed around. So Englands kids learned to run and kick far, before coaches got to them. Brazils similarly learned high technique and short movement games. Coaches had then to take those raw materials and build a way of playing round them.

In the 70s and 80s England were seen as a real threat internationally. Largely teams couldnt cope with our big centre forwards and our set pieces, along with our running power. The likes of Germany and Spain completely adapted their coaching education to alter how they played, to be better than us. In the late 90s we realised we had to adapt and went and looked at Spain, Germany, Holland etc, and that is how the current English coaching syllabus was created. Not to negate some of our natural abilities, but to enhance. Our academy level coaching is now the envy of Eurplope again.

Sorry to ramble on, but it is a topic I could go on about forever. I think we have more than played our part in football development and continue to do so. Some of the up and coming coaches in this country are criminally overlooked IMO. Football tends to be cyclical, lets see if we are at the forefront, or laggards, in 10 years time...

 

Another great post! You're not rambling, I love this stuff.

You're right about Jimmy Hogan and the Danubians. Managed MTK and Austria Wien. He obviously knew Hugo Meisl, manager of Austria in the 30s, and Gustav Sebes said that his Hungary team played football the way that Jimmy Hogan had taught them. People like Hogan, and George Raynor (took Sweden to Olympic Gold and a World Cup final- got the job on the recommendation of Stanley Rous), Fred Pentland, and Jack Greenwell (as well as others) who wanted to coach, had to go abroad because they were viewed with suspicion at home.

It was English coaches who kick started a lot of these foreign systems that we came to admire- Vic Buckingham, for example, gave Cruyff his Ajax debut and it was his ideas that were refined by Rinus Michels. So I'm not trying to diminish England's influence on the development of the game. I do feel we have traditionally had a tendency to go through a long process of trying to reject any innovation before we adopt it though.

I think you're right about different cultures interpreting football differently. That's where the simplicity of the game is its beauty. It is such a simple game that it can be adapted to fit into whatever space is available to play it. If you read Brilliant Orange, David Winner suggests that the use of space in the Dutch and Ajax teams of the 70s came about because the Dutch have to think about the use of space all the time. In South America you get fiction and poetry about football that has some literary merit (Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano is worth reading) but you don't really get that in Britain. So I think there are many things that influence a country's football identity. Geography, national character, history all have an influence. The game really can be seen as a reflection of society when you think about it like that.

 

Cracking reading marras, thanks for sharing