No Irish, No Yanks, No Clogs - FIFA World Cup 2018

Watch Lukaku's run. Drags the defender inside to create space for Meunier and then dummies it brilliantly for Chadli. Brilliant work. pic.twitter.com/RKseQLdX7q

— Jake. (@YedIin) July 2, 2018

seperate Fellaini: c or d thread imo

xp but for me clive he lacks intelligence clive

TBH it's pretty funny that the Belgian golden generation had to rely on fringe Premiership journeymen to bail them out.

not to beat this into the ground (too late for that eh?), but man united giving fellaini a new contract would be like the ministry of defence spunking away half their budget on siege towers and trebuchets

― I'd Rather Kecak (NickB), Tuesday, 3 July 2018 07:38

If siege towers and trebuchets had been demonstrated to be effective in achieving difficult-to-achieve objectives in the last 24 hours, this metaphor would hold.

Football's always had tension between different playing styles, there's not a uni-directional march of history towards a shining Pepball future.

Fellaini: c or d?

what's interesting is that there are shifts in overall trends over time and the most striking and consistent trend has been the rise of ultra defensive, deep football from lesser teams. as far as I'm aware the great sides of the 60s and 70s never had to deal with 11 players camped in their area just trying to suffocate space for the majority of the game

Well, there was catenaccio, which some of those great sides used to employ.

set a naccio to cat a naccio

That was the big modern-football-is-rubbish thing of the 60s, until Celtic beat Inter Milan in the 1967 European Cup Final, opening the door for Ajax to change the direction.

catenaccio seems to mean completely different things but originally it was the sweeper that was the distinctive feature right? looking through yr historical good defenses like yr 70s leeds & it's positionally p slack by modern standards. I think video has totally transformed defensive coaching, but would be v interested to see any older teams that played with deep lying dense lines like modern bus parking sides like to

ISTR that when keepers were allowed to pick up back passes the stifling method of choice was to concentrate play with a ludicrously high line and make sure you had enough speed at the back to poke the ball back to the keeper (also you could get away with kicking a speedy runner up in the air a few times before you'd even get a yellow card).

game's gone lads

*shakes perm, drags a cigarette to the ground*

game's gone

It may be that the stifling approach (which I really don't like, fwiw) has arisen in response to the Guardiola-era version of Cruyffian total football, of course, that it's a tactical response to a form of football which is tremendously difficult to defend against and which wasn't really necessary before?

Yes, the pass back to the keeper, brings back so many horrible memories of Celtic toiling against completely negative away sides in midweek European games.

xp tim otm

pls god spain dying has broken the spell

yeah I think the better/'more footballing' teams are the ones who are playing more old fashioned football in a lot of respects, or at least football which would be more familiar to those from 50 years ago, higher up the pitch, with a sweeper (keeper) and so on. another big change is the quality of the pitches. watching old games the deceleration on passes is amazing

the wicked little witch of the far east

I know you all hate possession football but I don't think you can blame pep for mourinho

you can a good bit

also possession isnt the characteristic

sterility and risk-aversion is

maybe a continuum to the same thing but as the man sez u kno it when you see it

possession is absolutely the characteristic. mourinho football is much less risky, when pep teams lose they often lose big bc they're high and they're all playing out of defense and so on

which reminds me: without cheating, does anyone know/fancy guessing who said this?

“By retaining possession of the ball, you are always poised for an attack. If you haven’t got the ball, you must be on the defensive. If you retain possession, how can the other side attack and get goals? . . . I favour a pass back to the goalkeeper if in difficulties. He is always in a position to send the ball to an unmarked colleague and so keep his side on the offensive . . . There is no such thing as a defender or attacker. We are all footballers and members of a team. The aim of everyone should be to play good football and contribute something towards scoring goals.”

Yeah a lot of terrible football in the Prem and Champo has been a result of managers trying to emulate the possession aspect without having the players or wits to execute the sudden gear changes and beautiful intricacies of genuine tiki taka-esque systems

That looks vaguely familiar ogmor, looking at some of the language I might guess Busby or Ramsey?

game's gone lads

ditto rabiot the psychic octopus :'(

it is indeed the good spurs boy and only manager to successfully bring it home, alf ramsey

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/29/59/9f/29599f0d6880ce4fdb314fe22aa79850--ipswich-town-lions.jpg

if you liked possession football on those pitches you REALLY liked possession football

Nobby Stiles, total footballer.

I have suggested before that 1966 feels like it happened at least in part because it was the only time England had a manager who was tactically on point. Venables a possible exception.

Indeed, England went from playing Tom Finney and Stanley Matthews and losing 6-3 and 7-1 to Hungary to playing Alan Ball and Nobby Stiles and winning the World Cup.

v impressed you got that so quick

Hang on, Alan Ball was good!

"Colleagues" felt v Ramsey-ish and I do find him a fascinating and admirable dude

One reason for England's more encouraging than usual performance this time round is probably because the trend towards a very fast, pressing game suits this generation of English players and a lot of them have come up under either Pochettino and Klopp (or both)*. Other recent England squads would try and take a patient, possession-based approach and just end up looking ponderous and/or panicking and reverting to just hoofing it up.

*The main exception here being the United players who look visibly liberated right now.

xp damn... max kudos for that. it is a lovely and distinctive usage. I don't know much about ramsey or football history so it was perhaps more surprising to me

My dad told me how when Ramsey first introduced Alan Ball into the England side, Ball went to him after the game and complained that all Ramsey had had him do was run up and down the wing for 90 minutes, to no obvious effect. Ramsey's laconic reply was basically "well if you don't want to play, that's up to you".

bloody hell, this story:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/03/mikel-john-obi-father-kidnapped-world-cup

fucking hell

Hang on, Alan Ball was good!

Alan Ball was always looked down on in Scotland as exactly the sort of red-in-the-face huffin' and puffin' 100% effort footballer England had been forced to rely to do trashy things like win a World Cup. The general consensus in Scotland, post-Ramsey, were that England were hod-carrying hoofers who relied on hard work and physicality to overcome the refined ball playing of 5 foot 5 Scotsmen with beer guts and 20-a-day habits.

That was always the thing in Scotland, you're beating us but you're beating us the wrong way.

"hod-carrying" is such a weird insult -- i for one wd respect neymar ten times as much if he neymared EXACTLY AS NOW, except always carrying a hod

actual hod-carrier before he became a footballer: vinnie jones

from hod-carrier to spear-carrier in 3 moves

Had no idea Switzerland were ranked so highly. Of the teams remaining, only Brazil and Belgium are ranked higher.

Mind you, 5 of the top 10 have already gone home and Chile didn't even qualify

lol @ that finish

The Zlatan - now more than ever

Back pass rule is *the* bug rule change of the past, what, century- the game we know did, in a sense begin in 1992, just not in the way that sky sports would have you think.

big rule change

the bug rule change was key too tho

really bad lack of precision on both sides.