A Question of Balance Part 2 In part 1 of this piece, I discussed the balance between financial viability and footballing success, and I concluded that the football club could be more open and honest with the fans, that we could be trusted with the information. In this second piece, I would like to tackle the balance of the team within the overall shape dictated by the tactics employed by the Chief Coach. Team balance is a very difficult thing to get right. Everyone knows when the team has balance. It is obvious because the team is scoring goals, but at the same time, it also looks secure defensively. However, when the opposite is true, many observers go straight for what they understand – the quality of a player’s contribution on the ball. They will blame individuals. They will tell you that player A or player B is not good enough. That is sometimes true, but putting it right is an expensive and impractical fix, when often the easier and quicker thing to fix is the system and the balance of the team. The fans will tell you one week how good player A is, and the following week, they will tell you that the very same player is poor. It is why I only believe the evidence of my own eyes. Fans are not only fickle, they also miss a lot of what is going on. It is one of the hazards of judging only on the basis of results and statistics. Good results often hide a deeper truth. Poor results mean It is back to school for the players, redoing all of those boring drills. We all knew before a ball was kicked that this season would be hard. We all knew that the players were very young and we had to expect some bad results initially. We all knew that the coach had a tough job because he had to improve the players before he could expect them to deliver results. That was his first job, he had to improve the players, and that would take time. We all knew that we would have to be patient. Watching Barnsley is not easy. We have a lot to put up with, but surely we knew that when we signed up. Balance in football comes when you get what follows right. Balance is not the whole story by any means, and in many ways it is simply a list of steps that a Coach needs to take in order to create more space when attacking, and deny the opposition space when defending. There are also other things that are just as important, and the need for the formation to complement and enhance the skills of the players is by no means the least significant. The Chief Coach also needs to make sure that he has planned for the opposition’s strengths and weaknesses, and has designed a system that makes the most of our advantages, whilst at the same time, covering up our weaknesses, and preventing our opponents exposing them. He needs to be sure that the players understand and believe in the game plan. Planning for Balance These are some of the areas where balance matters. Youth v Experience Daniel Stendel has reputedly asked for more experience. He has not been given it. Business has triumphed over football, but there are very good reasons for it (see A Question of Balance (part 1)). However, what does it mean for our chances of retaining our place in the Championship. Well, it means that they are lessened. A balance of youth and experience is what is required. Too much experience and there are not enough players willing and still able to run their blood to water. Too little experience, and all that youthful enthusiasm has no focus. Effort is wasted in the pointless chasing of lost causes. Ideally, you need an older head in goal. It all goes off in front of the keeper. He sees what is happening, and he can pass on what he sees. You need an old head at centre back. A player to captain the side and pull the strings from his place at the heart of the team. You need an old head in centre midfield for the same reason. That is just 3 players, but those players occupy key positions in the team. They are not there for their pace, they are there for their knowhow. The pace is out wide, where it is needed. The experience is inside, where it can see what is happening, and where it can see not only what is going wrong, but also tell teammates how they can put it right. After the closure of the summer transfer window, Paul Conway said that the club had more talent now than it did at the end of the previous season. He is right that the club has more potential talent than it did last season, but that talent is very young, and most of it has never played at the level of the Championship. We also missed out on a few players who would have filled some obvious holes in the balance of our team, a Championship match ready left full back and a tall striker who would have given us Championship match ready options. However, all of the players that we missed out on were also very young, and there were no rumours of players who were old enough to fulfil the Chief Coach’s request for more experience. The age balance of our side is not right. Left v right If there is no balance between the left side and the right, then our opponents know from which side we will attack and they know on which side to attack. It all becomes too predictable. Players should ideally be just as strong on either side. However, if they are not, the side that has the stronger foot betrays our intentions. If the wide players have their stronger foot to the inside, they are going to cut inside to link up with the front player(s) and have shots from the edge of the box. If they have their stronger foot to the outside, they are going to try to beat the full back to the outside and cross from the goal-line. Last season, both our centre backs were left sided. Pinnock drew the short straw to play on the right, but he consistently used his left foot to play the ball forward, meaning the natural curve of the ball was going to take long passes out of play. In our first two games this season, we used a right sided player at left back. His longer passes will tend to drift out of play. There is a better balance than last season, but there remains a problem at left back when Cavare plays there because he is right sided, when Pinillos plays there because he is short and he is slow and when Williams plays there because he is reckless.
A Question of Balance Part 2 (Continued) Attack v Defence What must be self-evident is that a team that never commits players to attack will score fewer goals. That team will also concede fewer goals. A pass represents a risk. Every pass risks the loss of the ball through misplacement, interception or poor control. Passing accurately is far more difficult where there is less space, either because there are more opposition players, or because that space is restricted because of the offside line or the goal/touch lines. Therefore, logic suggests that the more passes a team makes, the more likelihood there is that the ball will be lost. A player in possession can only beat a balanced opponent if he is particularly skilful or he is exceptionally quick. Every time the ball is lost, in a sense, it is lost unexpectedly. Because it is unexpected, players are occupying attacking rather than defensive positions. They are caught out of position. It has long been recognised that the time immediately after losing the ball is by far the best opportunity to attack, because an opponent is unprepared. Therefore every one of our attacks represents an opportunity for our opponent. When a team lacks experience. When its players are not familiar with each other or the coach’s plan, the balance of attack and defence is easy to get wrong. In those circumstances, a wise coach will produce a cautious game plan, but a cautious game plan wins fewer games. A cautious game plan is one that does not rely heavily upon passing accuracy and ball retention in situations where the team is overloaded on attack. As understanding and accuracy improve, the coach will gradually increase the risk that players are allowed to take. Defensive players (midfield and full backs) will be allowed to get further forward in support of an attack, but the risk of committing too many players forward and getting caught on the counter-attack never fully disappears. That is the whole point of the game, the balance of risk that teams are capable of handling before they break. An over commitment to attack will always leave a team vulnerable in defence. An over commitment to defending will leave a gap between the midfield and attacking lines that the team will find difficult to close before the ball is taken from an attacking player in the tackle. The balance between attacking and defending is a particularly difficult one to get right, and many coaches give up and simply put 5 players in midfield, committing neither to one thing nor the other. More than almost anything else, the balance between the two extremes is dictated by the quality of the players in the engine room, those in the centre of midfield. Mowatt and McGeehan were rightly praised last season. Their quality allowed the Barnsley team to largely dictate where the opposition defensive and attacking lines were draw, and therefore, where our corresponding lines were drawn. Unfortunately, they are not going to be able to dominate this season against better quality midfield players in opposition teams, and that is going to be especially true when they are outnumbered because we are playing 4-4-2 and the opposition is playing 4-3-3. That was even obvious against Fulham, when we won the game, even though Bahre’s position created a hybrid formation that was sometimes 4-4-2, and sometimes 4-3-3. Our Chief Coach has a natural bias towards attacking play. He has a culture that much prefers to see his team on the front foot. He defends from the front. The question is whether that natural aggression is right for either our team, which is very young and which is still getting to know one another, or our new position as a promoted team in a higher division and facing a better quality of opposition. We shall see, but so far he has been more cautious with the counter-press than he was at times last season. Tall v Short In losing Keiffer Moore, we have lost the ability to play in a different way. There is a danger than we will become too predictable when we can only play one way, and predictability is a gift to an opponent who is devising a plan to stop us. We have no-one with any height up front, and as a result, we can never use the long ball from back to front effectively, expecting to retain possession and building from higher up the field. Hitting the ball long, when you have no-one able to compete for it is effectively giving it away. Not only that, it dictates that our tactic will be to pass the ball from the back, with the back four all being prepared to receive the ball from the keeper. If that is obviously our only plan, because we do not have the players for any other, then the opposition can simply plan to push up on our back four when they have the ball. They stop the plan at source, and we do not have the players for any other. There is a gamble at the heart of this strategy, just as there is at the other end when we play the counter-press. If we are good enough to beat the press, then there is more room beyond it, because the players that would normally occupy that space have been drawn forward into the press, and as we know, more space equals more time, and more time equals more accurate passes to the front players. However, where there is opportunity, there is also a threat. If the ball is lost so close to goal, the chance of a goal against is improved. Like all of football, taking risks increases the chances of a goal, at both ends, particularly when the players do not have either enough talent or enough confidence. Any idea that we hit long balls anyway because of our increased pace and movement is wrong. The back 4 cannot take advantage of pace/movement over longer distances because there is more time to cut the passes out, though pace and movement will make passing from midfield easier over shorter distances. At the back, there is more reason to be pleased with our summer business. There is now height all along the back four, and that should mean that the players can cover one another from aerial attack as well as on the ground. We should not be beaten by the cross to the far post as we are when Pinnillos plays, even if one of our centre backs has been drawn out of the back line in order to cover a colleague. We have improved the defensive balance as compared to last season, but the balance of the team as a whole is worse as a result of the sale of Moore. Quick v Strong We have added pace across the team, and those responsible for recruitment can give themselves a congratulatory pat on the back. The teams that outplayed us at Oakwell last year all had pace, and moving up a league was bound to make the problem worse. There is now pace right across the back 4 and all of our wide midfield players have pace too. We still do not have enough pace up front, and the sale of Kieffer Moore has not helped. We are better equipped for pace this season, but so is opposition.
A Question of Balance Part 2 (Continued) Constructive v Destructive It is far easier to destroy than it is to create. That has always been true, but our Chief Coach reacts to that remark with ultra-positivity. He was brought to the club by the new board precisely for that reason. The board wanted to see a team that played on the front foot and which utilised the counter-press. I just wonder whether he and the board have the balance right for the Championship though. There is no doubt that last season we had far better players than almost every other team in our league. Stendel reacted by daring the opposition to commit their full backs to go forward. In most cases he did not react by bringing our wide players back in coverage of opposition full backs. The message he was sending was that he was confident that in a shoot-out, we will score more goals than you. Most of the time, our opponents reacted just how Stendel hoped. Just a few teams had the pace to trouble us, but the majority did not. They preferred to stay back and cover our threat. Morais played in the same way the last time we were in the Championship, and our opponents said, we are confident that we have more than you in a shoot-out… and they had. The point about that little story is that if Stendel makes the same mistake that Morais did, it will most likely end in the same result. In the Championship, our forwards do not carry the same psychological threat that they did in League 1. We cannot dominate our opponents with the same implied threat. We have to go about our business more honestly, and that means that our wide players must respect the threat from opposition full backs. In fairness, in our first few matches, they have done that, but it means that the counter-press will not be able to work in the same way as it did last season. Everything in football is threat and counter threat, cause and effect. In this case, the effect is that our Chief Coach will have to find a new and effective way to play against Championship teams. It is not only a steep learning curve for all our young players, it is also a very steep learning curve for our Chief Coach. In the Fulham game he drew the balance between creating and destroying in a slightly different place, but he has yet to establish where the most effective place is for that line to be drawn. Skilled v determined with strong work ethic Obviously, any coach would look for both traits in any player he acquires. But which is the more important. Without a strong work ethic and a will to win, the most skilled player in the world will be ineffective. Some circus performers have unmatched skills, but they do not play football, even though the pay would be far better. The answer is fitness, determination, work ethic and bravery. It does not matter how much of the former a player has, if he does not have enough of the later. Equally, it does not matter how much of the later a player has, if he does not have skill, he will not make it. Over my time watching from the stands, I have seen players with an abundance of both, but few players had both in equal measure. Gwyn Thomas springs to mind, and Brendan O’Connell is another. They had hearts as big as buckets, but it was allied to inadequate skills. Alastair Millar was a player who I once saw surrounded by four opponents who he left on the floor with a shake of his hip and a drop of his shoulder, Norman Dean could time a strike perfectly and he scored the best goal I ever saw, Ronnie Glavin with the ball at his feet was a maestro but asking him to track back was asking for the impossible. All three players had problems with their work ethic that kept them away from the very top level. The combination of both is rare at Oakwell, but the one who came closest was Neil Redfern. He dragged us into the Premier League through his goals and his hard work. He is my favourite player from 54 years of support. Character is far easier to spot than potential talent, because potential is the capacity for magic that comes and goes. Young players have it, but it gradually wanes. Young players are ordinary, and then the penny drops. Talent does not develop at the same rate in every player, and it is the reason that mistakes are made constantly by people with far more experience than I have. I am right occasionally, but I am wrong far more often. Direct v slower build up and retention of possession After the loss against Sheffield Wednesday, I read piece after piece on the BBS that criticised our build up play from the back, but it was exactly the same when we played Fulham when everyone praised it. I did not attend the Wednesday game, but from what I hear, they did to us what we did to Fulham. They pressed our back four when they had the ball. The Wednesday coaches had picked up what we had done and they turned it against us. But is that any reason for changing our game plan, after all whatever our game plan is, our opponent is going to seek to nullify it. There are good reasons why we are playing this way. First of all, we no longer have a target man capable of winning the ball in the air and holding it for the valuable few seconds until support arrives. I hope that we will look again for such a player in January, but for now we must try to play a different way. Secondly, anyone who has read my stuff will know the weakness of the counter-press. That weakness is that if the team being pressed can pass its way through it, there is space beyond, space that can be exploited by our smaller but quicker wide players and forwards. Now I will agree that it sometimes takes strong nerves to watch it, but our back four have been brought to the club partly because they can all pass the ball well. All I can suggest for the humble fan who finds it hard to watch is a dose of Valium before the game, because as much as we would all like it not to be so, the long ball is not on until further notice. Deep defence with goals from set pieces v swift counter attacks and long passes When I was a kid, 4-4-2 meant that as soon as the ball was lost, the team reorganised itself as quickly as possible into two banks of four. The idea was to deny the opposition space, and to use the off-side line and the goal line to keep the opposition attack far enough away from goal that the goalkeeper could be expected to deal with most shots from distance. This system cannot be used by a team that is using the counter-press, because the press needs more than the two forward players to press the opponent on the ball, and mark up all of his close passing options. It is either one thing or the other, and any team that is defending deep does not use the counter-press. Equally, a team that defends deep leaves a big gap between the midfield line and the forward line. It is a gap that cannot be bridged quickly, and the forward players find it hard to hold onto the ball long enough for support players to arrive. Instead, the deep defence relies less on possession of the football, and more on the occasional set piece play for its goals. With very swift wide players, this stalemate can be beaten. The tactic relies upon the wide player being able to carry the ball from deep in his own half, and that often means that he must beat his marker before he finds the space beyond. Once he beats the first man and gets into space, he is going to attract a second potential tackler, but that will often create space for others. It is not going to be a tactic that works for home games, because the away team rarely wants to over-commit in attack, but it will work away from home, provided the players are good enough, and that is essentially the question following a promotion. Will the players be good enough to do in the league above what they could do at the lower level? I do not know the answer to these questions yet, and I suspect that neither does Stendel. The players are still learning, and they must improve. But as I said in the first part of this paper, that is how the CEO will judge our Chief Coach. His success in improving young players. The counter-press v the more structured two banks of 4 I have already dealt with this above, and it has to be said that I am by no means convinced that the counter-press yields more goals than it allows, particularly in the Championship with it quicker players and more accurate passing. It has to be said that I understood the logic and reasoning for the structured two banks of four, but it is entirely possible that the reason that I do not like the counter-press is that I do not yet understand the logic of the counter-press well enough. Having said that, our counter-press does not seem to be working in the same way as it did last season, so I will continue to observe, and I will continue to learn, I hope. Balance is vital to the success of any team. A team with above average players will be undone if the balance of the team is not right. At the same time, balance without quality is never going to pay dividends. In my opinion, at the start of the 2019/20 season, the Barnsley team lacked both balance and quality and the main cause is youth, lack of experience and lack of understanding, both of the strengths and weaknesses of their team mates and the logic and mechanics of the system that the Chief Coach wants them to play. Daniel Stendel has his work cut out for him, because it is his job to improve the quality of his young charges, just as it is to find a system, tactics and blend of players that gives the team a better balance. I look forward to watching him work, but I believe that he will have worked a miracle if he keeps us in the Championship with this team.
Not a bad idea. We could all have a copy beneath our seats at Oakwell. If VAR ever comes in, it'll be something to read while the ref makes his mind up.
