No side, perhaps, is ever so much itself as when it is going out of the World Cup. When teams – or at least those with aspirations to the title – fail, they tend to fail in their own way, and become too much of themselves: self-parody is a perennial danger. And so Spain and Germany went out of the World Cup after anaemic performances in which they seemed to fetishise possession rather than it being a means to an end.
That doesn’t mean juego de posicion football is over, as some of the more excitable voices on social media have claimed; it just means that two teams who played football infected by Pep Guardiola had bad tournaments. Sides who play post-Cruyffian football won the league in Spain, England and Germany, while Napoli came second in Serie A.
Rather, after two World Cups won by post-Cruyffian sides, there has been a correction, just as in the Champions League semi-finals in 2013 there came a blip as the dynamic German style practised by Jürgen Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund and, to a lesser extent, Jupp Heynckes’s Bayern hammered the possession-driven Spanish model practised by Tito Vilanova’s Barça and, to a lesser extent, José Mourinho’s Real Madrid.
That did not consign juego de posicion to irrelevance; all it did was show that, while it remained a dominant style, it was one among many rather than being hegemonic over all others. But international football, anyway, is not like club football.
Although the World Cup was once a showcase for tactical trends, international football has never led the way tactically. The world was alerted to the possibilities of a back four by Brazil in 1958, but it had been deployed at Vila Nova, Flamengo and São Paulo for four or five years before that. Similarly, it may have been the Netherlands who popularised Total Football in the 1974 World Cup, but by then the Ajax of Rinus Michels and Stefan Kovacs had already won three European Cups.
Over the past four decades, as club football has become increasingly sophisticated, international football has looked a make-do-and-mend botch job by comparison. That is part of its charm: it’s arguably a greater test of coaching to find a way to cope with a long-term dearth of, say, left-wingers than simply going out and buying one, while the lack of preparation time perhaps introduces a greater element of randomness than is present in the club game (the World Cup, which has not produced a shock winner since West Germany in 1954, is long overdue one).
And, as so often, there is a danger when dealing with general trends in overlooking specifics. The reason for the early exits of Germany and Spain are manifold, and only partly related to tactics. Joachim Löw admitted his side had been arrogant and had perhaps not seen the warning signs. Perhaps he selected too many established names on reputation rather than recent form. The squad seems to have been riven by cliques.
Löw himself was perhaps found out: at the last World Cup he struggled to get the balance right between attack and defence and was bailed out by Miroslav Klose, who scored a vital goal against Ghana before offering a focal point to the forward line from the quarter-final on. Here, without Klose, or an in-form Thomas Müller, there was no edge to Germany’s attack and so despite 65.3% possession over the group stage, their threat was limited. Combine that with their issues in checking opposing counterattacks – damningly highlighted in pre-tournament friendlies – and the only outcome can be disappointment.
It’s natural, of course, that the longer a mode of play exists, the more strategies spring up to counter it. Xavi observed two years ago that Spain often struggled against a 3-5-2 (such as Chile deployed against them in 2014 and Italy in 2016) because it is difficult to press high against a team with five passing outlets at the back, particularly if they have two centre-forwards to occupy the central defenders. That was the route Russia’s coach, Stanislav Cherchesov, took, and it worked – but Spain were also guilty of wastefulness in midfield in a way their champion sides were not.
Spain’s coach, Fernando Hierro, acknowledges that football is evolving. “In 2008, 2010 and 2012 we had the players we had and we played at a level and in a style that nobody had done before,” he said. “Now we’re in 2018 and many things have changed. Other teams are playing with a [defensive] line of five, which had been forgotten. There are also a lot of direct balls and quick transitions. Everything is changing.”
But more fundamental is the point that it was Hierro in charge. The biggest single factor in Spain’s early exit was less to do with tactical developments than with the fact they sacked their coach on the eve of the tournament. Hierro was placed in an almost impossible position, playing with another coach’s squad with no time to instil his ideas. Against both Morocco and Russia, there were times when he seemed frozen. After two disappointing tournaments in a row, Julen Lopetegui seemed to have rejuvenated Spain; it’s impossible to say how they may have fared had Real Madrid’s arrogance not derailed their campaign.
Football moves on, but the biggest factor in the demise of Spain and Germany was less evolution than that enemy of so many great theories: events.
(The Guardian)
