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cad
22-05-2012, 03:06 PM
I was just thinking what with East Mains being a state of the art facility , maybe Pat would like to give some of this a go with our new squad .


Andre Villas Boas's footballing philosophy
The career of Andre Villas-Boas was famously launched by an encounter with Sir Bobby Robson in the Porto apartment block they shared.
Encouraged by Robson, Villas-Boas would write out detailed scouting reports and leave them for the great man in his post box.
Robson started to invite him to Porto’s training and informal coaching clinics that included Jose Mourinho.
Two years ago Villas-Boas had his own encounter with precocity. On March 27 2009 he went to the Cafe Maiorca in his home town to be interviewed by Daniel Sousa, a 24-year-old student in the faculty of sport at the University of Porto.
“He interviewed me when I was at Inter, assisting Jose,”explained Villas-Boas. “It was for his university thesis. When I got the club job with Academica back in Portugal I invited him to come and scout for me because from what I saw and heard during the interview it appeared to me that this boy could go all the way, in terms of scouting and in terms of management.” Sousa flourished.
GLOSSARY

Circulation: the retention of possession by passing from player to player without taking risks.
Vertical: Up and down the pitch, from goal to goal.
Horizontal: Across the pitch, from touchline to touchline.
Transition: When possession is regained, the opportunity to counter-attack.
Low block: A team that defends with two deep banks of defenders and midfielders. Mourinho’s succinct term for it was “parking the bus”.

A FOOTBALL PHILOSOPHY

AVB: There are more spaces in football than people think. Even if you play against a low block team, you immediately get half of the pitch.
And after that, in attacking midfield, you can provoke the opponent with the ball, provoke him to move forward or sideways and open up a space. But many players can’t understand the game.
They can’t think about or read the game. Things have become too easy for football players: high salaries, a good life, with a maximum of five hours work a day and so they can’t concentrate, can’t think about the game.
Barcelona’s players are completely the opposite. Their players are permanently thinking about the game, about their movement, about how to provoke their opponent with the position of the ball.
DS: Does a top team need to dominate possession to win a match?
AVB: Not necessarily, for a simple reason. In Portugal we have this idea of match control based on ball circulation.
That’s what we in Portugal want to achieve in our football: top teams that dominate by ball possession, that push the opponent back to their area.
If you go find the top English teams pre-Arsene Wenger they tell you how to control a match in the opposite way without much ball possession, direct football, searching for the second ball.
Maybe now, controlling possession is the reference point for a top team, but that happens because they have much more quality players than the other teams, so it would be wrong not to take advantage of those individual skills.
DS: One thing Louis Van Gaal says is that you can control a match offensively and defensively but you must keep in control defensively you can also determine where your opponent will play on the pitch.
AVB: Yes, I agree. In that sense, yes. But the idea we now have in Portugal of match control is about having more ball possession than the opponent.
DS: Exactly, but match control has to result in scoring chances. That’s the only way it makes sense. There are teams that have like 60 per cent ball possession and that results in nothing at all.
AVB: That’s it. Match control always has to have a purpose, a main goal.
DS: And in that concept of match control, are there any sectors of the team more important than others?
AVB: Well, that depends on the mechanisms you want to use defensively and offensively. Let me give you an example.
Top teams nowadays don’t look to vertical penetration from their midfielders because the coach prefers them to stand in position (horizontally) and then use the movement of the wingers as the main source to create chances.
So, you, as a coach, have to know exactly what kind of players you have and analyse the squad to decide how you want to organise your team offensively. And then, there are maybe some players more important than others.
For instance, many teams play with defensive pivots, small defensive midfielders.
And, except Andrea Pirlo and Xabi Alonso, and maybe Esteban Cambiasso and one or two more, they are players that are limited to the horizontal part of the game: they keep passing the ball from one side to another, left or right, without any kind of vertical penetration.
Can’t you use your defensive midfielder to introduce a surprise factor in the match? Let’s say, first he passes horizontally and then, suddenly, vertical penetration?


TALKING TACTICS

DS: What’s the difference between playing with three or four midfielders?
AVB: Rafa Benitez created a 4-4-2 much more dynamic than the usual English 4-4-2. Because he introduced speed in ball possession, he gave it variation between vertical and horizontal passes.
The usual classic English 4-4-2 is more basic: a penetrating midfielder and another one that stays in position; a winger who moves inside and another one who stays wide; a full back who overlaps and another one who covers the defence.
If you talk about a 4-4-2 diamond, that’s totally different. You play with two pivotal midfielders, one defensive and one offensive, so it creates many more problems for your opponent.
Defensively, though, you take a great risk of ceding too much space because you are very central and you lack width. You have to create compensation mechanisms.
Me, I’m a 4-3-3 fan, not 4-4-2. I don’t see how a classic 4-4-2 could work in the Spanish league, where every team plays 4-3-3 and the superiority of the midfield has become crucial.
What Mourinho did with Chelsea with his 4-3-3 was something never seen before: a dynamic structure, aggressive, with aggressive transitions...and then there is Barca’s 4-3-3, which wouldn’t work in England, because of the higher risk of losing the ball.
If you have midfielders like Frank Lampard or Steven Gerrard you don’t want your forwards to come and play between lines, because Lampard and Gerrard have a large field of action and very often move in to those spaces.
Lampard was often irritated with Didier Drogba because Drogba wanted to receive the ball there but then, amazingly, his first touch was poor, so he lost the ball and we were exposed to a transition from the opponent.
So we had to limit Drogba from going there and ask him to play deeper.

BARCELONA’S TACTICAL MASTERPLAN

DS: Is good ball circulation essential in the attacking organisation of a top team?
AVB: Well, it’s essential to every team. Every team want to score. That’s the purpose of the game. Barcelona play horizontally only after a vertical pass. See how the centre backs go out with ball, how they construct the play. They open up (moving wider), so that the right or left-back can join the midfield line.
Guardiola has talked about it: the centre backs provoke the opponent, invite them forward then, if the opponent applies quick pressure the ball goes to the other central defender, and this one makes a vertical pass.
Not to the midfielders, who have their back turned to the ball, but to those moving between lines, Andres Iniesta or Lionel Messi, or even directly to the striker.
Then they play the second ball with short lay-offs, either to the wingers who have cut inside or the midfielders, who now have the game in front of them.
They have an enormous capacity not to lose the ball, to do things with an unbelievable precision.
Another thing about Barcelona, there is always a full-back who arrives earlier in the attack, the other stays in position initially but then progressively joins the attack, as the ball circulates on the other side of the pitch, so he can be a surprise element. When you least expect he arrives. He chooses the perfect timing for the overlap.
DS: Louis Van Gaal says a vertical pass is not a risk, but a horizontal pass is because when you make a horizontal pass you are much more open, more exposed in case you lose the ball.
AVB: Yes, that’s right. And there are differences between a horizontal pass and a slightly diagonal pass.
Something that used to happen a lot in England, when teams played 4-4-2, was that the central midfielders exchanged the ball between them in parallel passes so what we did with Lampard, or Liverpool did with Gerrard, was to try to cut into that space between the two midfielders with fast movement from Lampard.
If they got the ball there, there were already two opponents eliminated in the attacking transition.




DEALING WITH DEFENSIVE TEAMS

Louis Van Gaal’s idea is one of continuous circulation, one side to the other, until the moment that, when you change direction, an space opens up inside and you go through it.
So, he provokes the opponent with horizontal circulation of the ball, until the moment that the opponent will start to pressure out of despair. What I believe in is to challenge the rival by driving the ball into him.
That’s something Pep Guardiola believes is decisive. And that’s something that Henk ten Cate also took to Avram Grant’s Chelsea. He took it with him form Frank Rijkaard’s Barcelona. We did it differently at Chelsea under Mourinho.
Our attacking construction was different, with the ball going directly to the full-backs or midfielders. With Ten Cate, play was started with John Terry or Ricardo Carvalho, to invite the opponent’s pressure. Then you had one less opponent in the next step of construction.

bobbyhibs1983
22-05-2012, 09:14 PM
very intresting insight and i think it ll go over alot of the scottish coaches head, never mind pat's head:wink:

I remeber seeing a programme on jose and how detailed he was with tatics and what not and the oppositions teams this and that and the players strengths and weakness's.
I just dont think many coaches/managers here in scotland are willing to go into that much detail.

HibeeMG
22-05-2012, 09:31 PM
I said it on the bus coming home on Saturday that our players seem to be very 'unintelligent' when it comes to the tactics of the game.

It shouldn't have needed the manager to point out to them that Hearts were seeing too much space in midfield. All it needed was the wider two midfielders to make sure they were covering the flanks. The middle two of our four needed to press the ball a lot more than they did. Yes, there was an overlap of 3v2 in there but there was always a covering central defender due to them playing one up front.

The passing and control of the Hearts players isn't good enough to be able to play around us all the time so putting them under pressure would have caused them to make mistakes. This would lead to good counter-attacking opportunities for us, especially as we had two men up front.

The problem we had wasn't that we played 4-4-2 versus a 4-5-1, it was that the 4 in the middle didn't work hard enough to press the ball.

D7 Bohs
22-05-2012, 10:03 PM
very intresting insight and i think it ll go over alot of the scottish coaches head, never mind pat's head:wink:

I remeber seeing a programme on jose and how detailed he was with tatics and what not and the oppositions teams this and that and the players strengths and weakness's.
I just dont think many coaches/managers here in scotland are willing to go into that much detail.

In 2010, PF's second last season at Bohs, he began using wingers on opposite sides; in other words, a left footed player on the right wing and vice versa so that, instead of running to the goal line and crossing with his favoured foot, he'd cut in and the either play it out to an overlapping full back, or hold it up for the CF (generally singular that year).

It wasn't popular, at least to begin with, since it meant moving Killian Brennan, who'd had two good seasons on the left across to the right, and put Quigley, who we thought had been brought in as a striker, onto the left. Nevertheless, on reflection, I think it did mean that, with a side much weaker than the season before with the departure of the creative bits of the midfield, he figured out a way to work the ball into the final third without a single naturally 'vertical' midfield player in the squad. A season in which we lost the league on the last day, on goal difference, to a much stronger Rovers side.

With Bohs - and with Shelbourne before - he always changed the tactics quite markedly, depending on the opposition; in Europe, we always played 4-5-1, and usually in away derbies against Rovers, often leading to criticism that he was being too cautious. Still, in both clubs, he was able to make relatively limited players do what they were told in a disciplined and intelligible way.

Which is why the shambles on Saturday really shocked me.

My point is though, he is pretty smart about tactics and has the ability to get players doing what doesn't come naturally.

cad
22-05-2012, 10:15 PM
I thought I new a little about football thats like a masters degree ,after reading that I realise I know zip . :wink:

Ozyhibby
22-05-2012, 10:35 PM
I thought I new a little about football thats like a masters degree ,after reading that I realise I know zip . :wink:

I started coaching last year (under 6's). Started going to SFA coaching coarses. Can't believe how little I understood the game. Anyone interested in improving their Knowledge of footy should definitely take advantage of the courses out there and also help the next generation of kids.