You are playing against a physical opponent. They
use man-marking and relentlessly press man-to-man all over the pitch. Let’s say it is also an
away game. With the support of their fans, opponent players are fired, and you know, for
90 minutes, your team will feel the breath of the opponent marker at their neck like a
hungry wolf. How do you overcome it? Well, maybe standard guidelines of positional play may
not help you this time. -How important was the movement of your players today? -Mov
e the ball. It
looks like it's moving the players but the move is the ball that is.. People believe "oh how they
move" no no but the move is the ball. Everybody has to be in the position. When you move much
that's not good. We can find many Guardiola quotes regarding positional play: "When you have the
ball, you don't move, you stay in position. you move the ball and thus the opponent," but if your
opponent doesn't take the position of the ball as a strong reference while defending, but tak
es the
position of your players, then you might be having some problems. Like Guardiola, Simone Inzaghi is
another coach giving a lot of importance to space occupation in the in-possession phase. However,
his team occupies the pitch in a much more dynamic way compared to many other teams. His players
constantly move on the pitch, but the movements are not individualistic, during their movement,
everybody continues to pay extra attention to the collective unit, to the rational occupation of
space, and distances between teammates, opponents, and the ball, and as a result, even all players
move, they continue preserving a solid structure. In fact, Inter’s game style with the ball
carries many similarities with motion offense, which is an attacking scheme used in basketball.
It’s a type of offense based on player movements. Lots of pass and cuts, pass and screens,
and back screens. When you watch Inter, you can see the application of motion offense
in football. Movement is alway
s key in Inter's possession play from build-up to progression
to chance creation, and they move so smoothly and naturally at any part of the pitch, that space
is always occupied logically. This gives them the speed to populate areas faster than the opponent
and create a free man quicker than more rigid positional approaches. This idea especially works
very well when your opponent tries man-marking. .. Look for example, against Atalanta,
after he passes the ball how Bastoni attacks the space
to overcome his
marker and becomes the free man. Like Atalanta, Luton is a team that heavily
uses man-marking at any sub-phase of the out-of-possession phase. Against Luton, we
probably observed the least structured Pep team ever. When Man City had the ball, this time, the
movement of players was the key for them as well, although these movements sometimes didn’t make
any sense from the classical positional point of view. In fact, not using typical formations
and not occupying the pitch w
ith equal or logical distances created huge vacancies at
Luton’s half, and Manchester City players continuously attacked these spaces. For example,
here De Bruyne is staying very close to Haaland, they are both far away from the ball and
the fact that the team doesn’t use a typical formation helps them create a huge space at right
half-space. KdB attacks this space and delivers another assist to Haaland. City’s intentional
unorthodox positioning helped them in this game to create space and
attack it, we regularly
saw diagonal runs Nunes running to left wing, Doku to right, or Stones and Haaland doing
up and down runs, and De Bruyne roaming everywhere on the pitch. And City created
many many many chances, scored 6 goals. These movements of course were not
products of hasty decisions. Another critical aspect of City’s and Inter’s
success in finding free man against man-oriented approaches was their
patience and composure with the ball. -We need the players today that don't pla
y
one touch. We need to make a lot of touches, every player need a lot of lot of
touches because against man-to-man, when you play one touch, it is what they want. Instead of quick passes, they resisted the
press and waited for the right moment to attempt to break the pressure. Here few more
touches from Mikhytaryan attract Bastoni’s marker and give Bastoni time to run up,
attack the space, which is also emptied by Mikhytaryan’s down run, and become the
free man. And once the free man occu
rs, the right opportunity arises to break
the pressure, as Barella does here, they could manipulate the tempo and attack
the opponent’s box quickly and vertically. -So football is going to the direction Luton
play. So aggressive. It doesn't matter you are at the top of the league,
at the bottom, or at the middle. As we see the rise of high press in world football
and the increase in man-marking approaches due to the simplicity for implementation as well as
effectiveness against typical rig
id positional approaches with the ball, the movement of players
will become a more and more critical need. And as the movement becomes more and more common, we can
see more unpredictable and enjoyable sequences. If the structure could be preserved while players
moving around, utilization of such an approach could be extended to destroy zonal or mixed
high-pressing schemes as well. Against zonal approaches, spacing and distances are always
critical. This is exactly why positional play has be
come very famous in recent years. Move the
ball, preserve the structure, shift the opponent, and the gaps will occur between and within
the opponent’s pressure lines. However, if you can simultaneously use more player
movement, you can create further confusion for opponent defenders who try to protect their
individual zones, manipulate their shape, create further space and fill the space
faster and more effectively. While you stay more confusing and unpredictable through
fluidity, motion,
and rotations, positional play will be also searched more in micro-situations.
If you are asking how all these things can be done simultaneously, then you should watch
Inter Milan. Inzaghi’s Inter have already excelled in these movements while preserving their
structure, which prevents them from being caught off-guarded in the case of possession loss and
still use the advantages of positional play to progress and create chances not only against
man-marking opponents but any zonal or mixed ap
proaches settling either at low or high
line. For the coaches who are interested in following this trend, Inter is certainly
a team that should be studied carefully. Thank you for watching my video.
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