Symmetrical game plans
Years ago whilst watching my son play football I was talking with another father who told me he was planning to take over running his son’s team. From his pocket he produced almost literally the back of an envelope with his thoughts on how he would like the team to play. I read it and it was all perfectly agreeable stuff, and the kind of thing coaching courses suggest you produce and use as a basis for your training sessions and matches. The one thing that struck me about it was an apparent asymmetry between how he thought his team should attack and how they should defend – he wanted to “attack with width” and “defend narrow”. Logically speaking, if you think that, say, crossing the ball is how you win matches then you really ought to be attempting to reduce the amount of crosses you have to defend. Your approach should be symmetrical in the sense that whatever it is you think your team should be doing is surely what you want to prevent the other team from doing to you.
In this case, if my friend thought “attack with width” was the right way to go then “defending narrow” surely invites the opponents to “attack with width”. It possible that he probably thought his young lads weren’t going to carve their opponents open in the middle and “attack with width” was actually just a more realistic description of how things were going to pan out. Let’s put that generous thought aside so that I may move seamlessly from bad-mouthing grassroots football coaches to spearing larger prey.
A short history of defending wide free kicks in the final third
Professional teams in England have evolved how they defend against wide free kicks close to their goal. My memory is slightly hazy – little did I know I might be writing a blog post about it in 2021 so I haven’t taken any notes – as I recall teams once would pack the box and defend much in the same was as they do for corners, with similar results, most of the time nothing would come of it but occasionally the ball would arrive perfectly for a header and they would concede.
My recollection is that Arsenal changed how they defended from this plan to one where the team would hold an offside line outside the box so the penalty area would be empty enough that Cech could come out and punch the ball clear without anyone getting in his way. Over a period of time Cech gradually stopped coming out to punch possibly because him running forwards with his fists out while defenders run back with their eyes on the ball is a car crash waiting to happen. That’s how teams defend at the time of writing, with an offside line outside the box and the keeper on the line.
In the image above we can see Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City defending in exactly this manner. What is surprising to me about this, is firstly that it seems like an objectively terrible way to defend. A common rule of thumb is to not try to play the offside trap when you have no pressure on the ball, here it’s a free kick, so there is zero pressure on the ball. This way of defending doesn’t agree with that maxim for a start. City’s offside line is static and if the Wolves players time their runs they will have a dynamic advantage that will allow them to get in behind the defence. That means City have little control over the very dangerous space in front of the goal. Even if City’s defenders are able to keep up with the on-rushing attackers they are faced with the problem that as they are running towards their own goal any touch on the ball will direct it towards goal rather than away. As it happens, Wolves’s Coady gets to the ball first and heads it in.
Everything I know about football tells me this is a terrible way to defend and yet lots of Premier League teams insist on it. What boils my mind is that Pep of all coaches knows about the importance of getting in behind teams and forcing defenders to defend facing or running back towards their own goal. Indeed, City’s first goal in this game came from them deliberately doing exactly that. Incredibly, Pep has the same asymmetry in his principles of play as the father I was talking to.