It Has never been Harder for Large teams to break down their smaller counterparts but managers often don’t Possess the time needed to execute fixes. Tottenham have made 11 points from their past nine. Arsenal have won one in seven beneath Mikel Arteta.
If Nigel Pearson can get Watford shooting, certainly the elite English clubs can get themselves in order quicker than this?
Murmurs of discontent are growing, albeit quietly for today and to varying degrees. Spurs fans were not likely to heat to Jose Mourinho and understandably have a shorter fuse. Chelsea fans are starting to wonder if a more coherent strategy will emerge under Frank Lampard .
It’s been a particularly strange season round the Premier League. No staff between third and eighth has accumulated over nine points from their last six matches. Fifth and 13th are separated by just five points. The quality, or at least the consistency, at the Premier League has seldom been so low.
But while Chelsea, Spurs, and Arsenal fans aren’t alone in bemoaning the lack of eyesight, cohesion, or technical skill within their groups, they stand out as nightclubs with current manager changes who just can not seem to click into gear.
Short-termism is a plague on soccer. The extraordinary revenue available from the Premier League and Champions League, which is then immediately invested in player wages and transfer fees, creates a fiscal imperative to stay in these competitions. This, in turn, encourages alarmist decision-making and risk-averse strategies as clubs desperate to bring order to the chaos become trigger-happy about the 1 factor they can control: the supervisor.
The’new manager bounce’ becomes a very important part of the long-term endeavor, while 18-month managerial cycles are recognized as an essential means to keep the players on their feet to keep lurching forwards and scrape by in profitable competitions. If fear is driving decisions, it becomes much more difficult to stay composed in a long-term eyesight and all of the bumps in the road that include it.
This process has become this kind of inevitable, and mostly unconscious, part of soccer that fans have come to signify that impatience, the obsession with income flows, and the demand for immediate effects.
That cycle has to be broken because the developing financial chasm in soccer has not just created short-termism, it’s fundamentally changed the strategic dynamic of the game. Managerial projects have never had so much time and coaches on the peak of the game haven’t been so vulnerable; therefore encouraged to find quick fixes.
Clubs down the table have accepted their place in the food chain and accommodated, hiring managers who focus primarily on defensive organisation and how to hold a profound block. They know they can’t compete as equals, and that’s the reason why the huge majority of games are now attack versus defence; ownership versus counter.
Between 2003 and 2006, just three Premier League matches watched one group hold 70 percent or more possession. In the past few years, the figure has been closer to 75 each year.
As the poorer club retreats, the stronger must accommodate; find new ways to make space in a congested closing third. As recently as five years ago the primary focus of elite-level training was the way to maneuver the ball to the opposition’s defensive zone. Nowadays, that’s a given, a necessity forced upon you, and so focus have shifted to how to prise the resistance apart and turn that ownership into clear-cut chances.
It’s a significant cultural change that has made soccer tactics more complicated than previously; in an attritional warfare, patience, teamwork, the rhythms of a game, confidence, cohesion, and especially trained attacking motions are vital.
This is why Manchester City’s collapse felt so powerful and so sudden when only 1 player got hurt, or why — before the last 18 months of devotion — Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool’s brilliant form was interrupted with sudden bouts of chaos.
And so it’s unfair to expect anything more from Lampard, Mourinho, or Arteta within the next six to 12 months. What they should be training — the’automatisms’ of soccer, synchronised moves practiced until muscle memory — requires a painstaking period of time to execute.
Crucially, the system may appear aimless right up until the minute things click. It occurred with Klopp in Liverpool and in Borussia Dortmund, while Guardiola’s first time at City left many questioning whether he could make it in English soccer.
Clubs lower down the Premier League, such as Watford, can make dramatic improvements with relatively easy defensive changes. The fact Pearson can turn things around has little bearing on what’s required to handle at the top; to counterattack down the flanks requires nowhere close to the training experience of what Arteta and Lampard are attempting to do at Arsenal and Chelsea.
It can be excruciating for lovers conditioned to be impatient, but at no point in history have trainers needed more time, and unconditional support, than in this era of tactical sophistication in the last third.
Fans must give it to them or risk their team getting trapped in a cycle of quick fixes; of strategies made for short-term effect – the sort that can’t win titles.
