The men in the middle
Playing football as a kid, on through my apprenticeship when I went to England and into the early stages of my professional career, the only formation I played was the traditional 4-4-2.
It’s only in recent years that new systems have been tried in a bid to dominate the midfield battle that so often can be the difference between winning and losing matches.
I’ve heard Graeme Souness talk about the role of the modern day midfielder on a couple of occasions and, as one the finest all round midfielders to have played the beautiful game, he should know a thing or two about it. Souness cannot get his head round how players nowadays seem to be designated either a holding midfielder or an attacking midfielder because in his day, and mine too, playing the 4-4-2 system meant it was a simple case that if your midfield partner got forward then you made sure you sat in to give the defence some protection.
Sounds pretty straightforward to me but you rarely see it these days. When Claude Makelele arrived at Chelsea and played the holding role as well as anyone we had seen, it seemed to start a trend in the Premier League, with others following suit pretty quickly.
The reasoning behind playing with an out-and-out defensive midfielder is that it gives constant protection to the two centre-halves while enabling the full-backs to get forward. And, as we have seen in recent seasons, it’s increasingly the full-backs who supply attacking width as traditional style wingers fade from the game. More and more wide players are much happier to come inside when they receive the ball rather than take on the opposition full-back down the line.
In this week’s European action I saw some familiar faces I have come up against for our national team — Barcelona’s magicians Xavi, Iniesta and Fabregas, Real Madrid’s Alonso and Modric, Bayern’s Kroos and Schweinsteiger, Paris St Germain’s Thiago Motta and Juventus’ mercurial Andrea Pirlo.
I have played against some of the finest midfielders in the modern era at both international level and in the Premier League and I find it very hard to say who was the best, since they all bring their own personal qualities to bear on the role.
Compare Xavi Alonso to Bastian Schweinsteiger, for example. Alonso is a proper holding midfielder who initiates a lot of attacks with his precise short and long-range passing and rarely gets ahead of the ball. Schweinsteiger can do the defensive role very well too but is quite often given the license to get forward to use his creativity on the ball and weigh in with some goals, as we saw at Old Trafford on Tuesdaywhen he timed his run to perfection and finished clinically.
Toni Kroos has been tipped to make a move to Old Trafford this summer and if United manage to snare him then they will not only get one of the best midfielders around but one who is improving with every season. Kroos is in the Gerrard and Schweinsteiger mould. He can sit and run games with ease from deep but is also very comfortable when he gets forward , as we saw when he put two past us for Germany at Lansdowne Road on that night we all want to forget.
One English player I admire greatly is the aforementioned Steven Gerard. I first came up against him when I was playing for the Wolves youth team back in 1997 and I remember even then people talking about him, saying he was going to be the next big thing. There was no doubting his ability and it was easy to see that he was destined for a bright future but, ironically, the one thing that most stuck in my mind about him was how tough he was and that he could tackle with vengeance. Some midfielders you want to try avoid giving too much time on the ball as they will hurt you with their passing range, others have the ability to skip past you if you rush in too quickly or can play first time passes to make sure they don’t get tackled — but Gerrard can do it all.
So how do you go about stopping the midfield masters? When I face an opposition midfielder I always try and work out his strengths. With household names I will already know from having seen them play on TV but with young players breaking through or foreign players just arriving in the league, then I rely on our analysts at the club who do all the research on them and send me emails with clips.
And it’s important to keep up to speed as there’s no doubt football has changed a lot in the last ten years. The qualities of the players I’ve been writing about today have definitely illuminated the game, but I feel something has been lost too as the midfield battle becomes less about tackling and more about reading the game to intercept passes or deny the opposition space.
As a result, the days of the Keane/Viera rivalry are unfortunately gone — and I’m not sure that they will ever return as the lawmakers in the game seem determined to make football a non-contact sport.
