Phil Ball: Press or bust, Barca miss their Inie-star

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  • A couple of weeks ago, around 6 p.m. Spanish time on Saturday I texted my son in Scotland. I’d just seen the East of Scotland Premier results, and his team, Stirling, had lost 3-4 at home to Coldstream. I asked him what had happened. He’s the captain, and plays centre-back. ‘The forwards didn’t do their job’ he texted. Confused by this response, I replied ‘But they scored three goals. Maybe the defence weren’t doing theirs?’ There was a pause and then the clarification; ‘They didn’t press. No ‘presionaron las salidas’ (They didn’t stop the opposing centre-backs building the play). By telling me this in Spanish (he was brought up here in Spain), he was implying that such tactical sophistication was still beyond the Scottish game, or that he had failed to communicate this tactic to his subordinates in good Scots dialect.

    Watching Sevilla play Valencia on Saturday night I was reminded of this text-based dialogue. In the first half of the game in the Sánchez Pizjuan, a game that high-flying Sevilla were expected to win with relative ease, both sides completely cancelled each other out by dint of this pressing game to which my son was referring. It has become such a feature of post-modern football that when a team fails to do it, the consequences can be dire – at any level. The tactic has spread like wildfire, and has become a particular favourite of sides who feel that any technical inferiority they might possess can be compensated for by ‘pushing up the line’ – to quote the current dictum – and forcing the opposition’s playmakers or centre-backs into errors or aimless punts downfield, restricting their ability to dominate possession. The Barcelona Dream-Team 2, ironically, made the tactic fashionable by basing their revolutionary ‘tiki-taka’ approach on the speedy recovery of the ball, on the few occasions that Xavi and company committed the sin of misplacing a pass or of losing out to a tackle. As Arsène Wenger lamented after a defeat, ‘It’s bad enough that they have the ball almost all the time, but when you finally get it back they just take it off you again’.

    The problem with the approach, if you don’t have Xavi or Andres Iniesta of course, is that it requires extraordinary levels of fitness, attackers who are prepared to chase around like greyhounds after rabbits, and the awkward fact that it tends to function well for the first hour of a match, after which the strain begins to show – sometimes turning the contemporary game into a contest of stamina. Those who stumble first shall forfeit the points, it would seem, making it all the more important to strike early on, to draw first blood. The ‘high-line’ is also a risky strategy, because the advanced position of the midfielders obliges the defence to move up accordingly, to reduce the distances between the team’s different zones. It can make for entertaining fare, but on Saturday night it ruined the game.

    This is why contemporary top-level centre-backs look more like David Luiz and Rafael Varane than the slower Jackie Charltons of yesteryear. They are expected to be sprinters and ball-players now, and strikers are supposed to prevent them from playing. It’s as if the game has been turned upside-down. Indeed, if you went back to 1970 in a time-machine, kidnapped a top player and sat him down to watch Sevilla v Valencia on Saturday night, this is surely the most striking difference he would notice, apart from the lack of hair perms. Sevilla, playing five across midfield, employed Luciano Vietto as lone striker, obliging him to spend the entire first half chasing down Valencia’s Ezequiel Garay and Aymen Abdennour, with occasional help from Franco Vázquez. Nani and Rodrigo did the same for Valencia, with the resulting stalemate obliging a re-think at half-time.

    Strikers from previous eras of football must also watch from their sofas with some sense of relief. Gone are the days when their type could simply hang around up front, waiting for ‘service’. The breed of Hugo Sanchez goal-hangers, ‘buitres’ (vultures) as they were called in Spain, is well and truly extinct. The Gerd Muller and Denis Law types would find the current scene very different from their day, when all that was expected of them was to be in the right place at the right time. Chasing down centre-backs? Perish the thought! They would probably have gone straight to their Union representative and argued that such duties were not specified in their contract.

    Valencia came to Seville on a poor run of only one win in six games, their hosts boasting exactly the opposite – one defeat in six league games and a more-than-decent chance of qualifying for the next round of the Champions League, despite the 1-3 setback at home to Juventus in midweek. Valencia however, hovering just above the relegation zone, decided to play the game at the most intense physical level possible, mercilessly harrying the Sevilla players and disrupting their rhythms sufficiently to make it all square by half-time. Sevilla, instead of trying to calm their own play and retain the ball in the first two-thirds of the pitch, simply responded in kind, resulting in a high-tempo but messy first-half, with barely any decent football to entertain the onlookers. After the break Sevilla mercifully scored, and Valencia loosened up, brought on Munir and immediately looked the better side. They will have been disappointed to go home without the points.

    It had looked like a potentially interesting game. Both sides belong to what the Spanish press refer to as the ‘upper-middle class’ of La Liga teams, with expectations often outweighing reality. Valencia began the post-millennial period with a bang, but have since faded badly. Sevilla, on the other hand are looking fairly potent, and their 2-1 win, whether they deserved it or not, keeps them in touch with the leaders and maintains the dream of a sustained attempt at the league title. Well – they haven’t won it since 1946, despite their upper-middle class status, whereas Valencia last lifted the trophy in 2004.

    Elsewhere in the upper reaches, Real Madrid struggled in the rain of the Bernabéu, rather as they had struggled in Portugal on Tuesday night, but nevertheless won 2-1, courtesy of a late penalty miss by Duje Cop. They may have got lucky, but can now point to 31 games undefeated since losing at Wolfsburg last April. It sets them up nicely for the season’s first clásico next Saturday afternoon. Barcelona, on the other hand, faced a potentially more demanding rehearsal in Anoeta, where they had lost in the previous four meetings and where Real Sociedad were on a fine run of form.

    Things went more or less as predicted, but Real Sociedad actually played Barça off the park, particularly in the first half. They played a pressing game to a certain extent, but the highlight of the encounter was the fact that the hosts played the better football, starving Barcelona of possession and often running them dizzy. Once they went ahead in the second half the floodgates might have opened had it not been for a few seconds brilliance from Neymar and Lionel Messi, combining for an excellent equaliser. Later, the calamitous referee Gil Manzano doubly-annulled a perfectly legal goal. Carlos Vela’s shot hit the bar and crossed the line, and when Juanmi knocked in the rebound he was incorrectly judged offside by the linesman. I’d just nipped down the stairs for a sandwich in the club bar, and saw the incident more clearly on the TV. It might be a pair of errors without precedent but Barcelona, poor throughout, won’t be complaining. They’ll have to improve considerably if they intend to make up that six-point gap next week. The presence of Andres Iniesta would certainly help them.

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