From an article in the Guardian. Maybe Chief is going to come up with an answer by next Saturday, as for sure Auckland will be pressing hard.
Interesting to see Chris Wood mentioned at the end. Last year the Nix had tallish Zawada up front to receive, this year shortish Kosta
“Maybe passing out from the back has started to become counterproductive as opponents become increasingly adept at setting pressing traps. Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton demonstrated how a team can trigger the opponents’ press as an attacking move, looking to generate space behind them that can be exploited, but that is a high-risk strategy.
But what is the alternative? Go long and the risk is possession is wasted – all the more so for teams without a target man – the only benefit being that the ball is at least lost a long way from goal. There is no clear halfway house, nor even much of an option for disguise: go long with players dropping to provide a short-passing option as a decoy and the danger is that possession is not merely lost, but there is no chance to set the defensive line before an opposition attack gets within shooting range.
Football is entering one of those crux periods in which it’s clear something has to change but it’s not obvious what. The paradigm is familiar: a team starts doing something, opponents react to stop them and then, for a while, a new consensus is reached before the next revolution. It feels as though what is happening now is that pressing structures are able to catch teams passing out from the back often enough that patient buildup from deep can no longer be an unthinking default.
At the very least, teams probably need to develop an exit strategy: what do they do if they find the opposition press squeezing them? Perhaps speculative balls into the channels for runners will become a counter to the counter-strategy. Or perhaps passing out from the back, while remaining the approach for the best teams, will become less common for others.
Perhaps teams will start going long more as a matter of course, although that would mean the return of big No 9s, who are perhaps already starting to make their comeback. Perhaps Chris Wood is not the throwback he had appeared but the future.”
