Larry Ryan: Getting naughty in search of football's next idea
POINT TO MAKE: Chelsea's Argentinian head coach Mauricio Pochettino speaks to referees at the end of the English Premier League football match between Chelsea and Luton at Stamford Bridge (Photo by HENRY NICHOLLS / AFP)
We are in a holding pattern at the moment, waiting for football’s next big idea. Talking to Alan Shearer for last weekend, Mauricio Pochettino complained it was all getting a bit samey in the Premier League. “Now it’s like all teams try to build from the back, all the teams try to press high all the time. It’s like it was contagious.
"(Before) you would have 20 teams in the Premier League and it was difficult to find two or three teams playing in the same kind of style. It was all different and really attractive and exciting."
Inverted full-backs, ball-playing keepers, half-spaces, single pivots, overloads, high blocks. When they are all at it, it’s getting harder for a Premier League gaffer to differentiate himself, to build his brand.
This accord on the right way to play has put a notable premium this summer on ‘the six’, the supporting beam in midfield at the centre of it all. Anybody with any notions about playing the position is currently suffering a crisis of confidence if they didn’t move for at least £100m. If we think Roy Keane is currently in demand as a pundit and all-round entertainer, imagine what he’d be worth if he was still playing.
Poch bagged a few of those sixes but perhaps he has his eye on something different at Chelsea, once he has conducted a wide-ranging census to find out who else is in his playing squad.
“We just need to settle everything, to be able to play in a different way,” he told Shearer, “to be more compact, to sometimes be more naughty, to be more competitive.”
Naughtyball, you’d have to say, has strong brand potential. And the moment may just be right to unveil it when Premier League referees are clamping down on everything except fouls.
Eddie Howe and his deputy Jason Tindall seemed to have something similar in mind last season, in their efforts to become the division’s plucky overlords, to work some angle as the rich kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Unfortunately, market conditions aren’t ideal at the moment for a philosophy based on time-wasting and dark arts.
We remember that Brendan Rodgers was among the first managers to admit the necessity to “create a brand for myself” around his philosophy and boardroom-ready mantras and catchphrases. His first spell at Celtic helped polish some of the rough edges of that brand after things unravelled at Liverpool. And Ange Postecoglou has also seen the value of a stint at Parkhead to showcase his ideas without necessarily exposing them to the jeopardy of top-level competition.
The Aussie is arguably the early table topper in the Premier League Brand Value stakes, with the Tottenham faithful so far quite taken by Angeball. Although Angeball appears to be largely based around most of the same principles everyone else is using, it helps that these fans have just endured several seasons of Angstball under Mourinho and Conte.
Postecoglou, mind you, may have made a small tactical error this week with his Carabao Cup selection. These feelgood honeymoon weeks weren’t the ideal time to remind fans of the club’s allergy to silver.
In these impatient times, the result of Sunday’s big one will put a dent in the brand equity of another gaffer, a substantial one if Manchester United go home defeated. At another time, in another place, Erik ten Hag may well be coming across right now as one of the great football visionaries, setting trends and effecting dynamic change. But somehow he hasn’t really sold us his vision all that well yet. So maybe he hasn’t sold it fully to his players either. In any case, there are still a few characters there, you suspect, who won't buy what anyone is selling.
Meanwhile, if there are no big ideas any more, there is a growing fear out there that Mikel Arteta is labouring with a debilitating addiction to small ideas. It is easy to picture him as some sort of lean manufacturing consultant, enthusiastically lecturing a boardroom on eliminating waste through reduction of inventory buffers. And by doing it with passion, guys.
Playing a midfielder as his inverted full-back is the latest crusade of the ideas man in his quest for total control of everything that happens on the pitch. Perhaps Arteta will ultimately fulfil his mentor Pep’s dearest wish that he “could play with 11 midfielders”.
Those days are long gone for Pep, of course, now that he has somewhat reluctantly accepted there are easier ways of winning games. He may never quite come to terms with Erling Haaland’s tendency to give away possession by kicking the ball into the goal, but now he has also recruited lads like Jeremy Doku and Matheus Nunes — more dribblers than passers — as well as setting Jack Grealish free.
Pep is hardly about to attempt a pivot to a Moyesian approach of scoring without having the ball at all. But might he, to ward off Everest ennui after completing football, be set to run wild, to abandon the quest for total control and embrace the chaos? Maybe he will ban passing altogether unless it’s onto Haaland’s noggin.
If it all goes wrong, there is always Rodri to play naughtyball on the halfway line. And amid all the small changes at City, it is somewhat intriguing too that Bernardo Silva, who has so often made clear his plans to go elsewhere, has been once again held hostage on a new contract.
Jurgen Klopp was once all about chaos. "Organised chaos" was a fundamental element of the Klopp brand. At their best, there was something elemental in Liverpool's play that partly came from an acceptance that total control could never be achieved.
That philosophy suffered when Klopp no longer had midfielders to run wild, or barely run at all. But he has replaced that sector now, so the fire may be back.
And even if any kind of control frequently eludes the unpredictable Darwin Nunez, in his heroics last Sunday Klopp might just have his spark.
Not often, during the white heat of championship, is an exponent of the garrison game cited as inspiration. Messi gets the occasional shoutout, but mostly, when the soccer gets a mention, it's to speculate how much rolling around would be done after a challenge like that.
So it's a fair measure of Richie Hogan's ridiculous Paul Daniels pickpocket goal against Galway in the 2020 Leinster Final that the velvet touch of Dennis Bergkamp came to so many minds at the same time.
When Hogan was sent off in the 2019 All-Ireland final there was endless discussion about the small picture, about whether his tackle deserved the red.
It probably did, but in the bigger picture, his career certainly didn't. Hogan wasn't that type of player and it was a cruel blemish on an innings that decorated the game so tastefully.
So it was beautiful that his next outing in Croke Park delivered that cameo, a split second in time that embossed a litany of such touches. A calling card to explain to anybody how much was in his locker.
At the time, he called it a "redemption story". "It was just fantastic to have better memories in Croke Park than the last time I was there."
In his retirement statement yesterday, he wrote how the "last couple of years have been hugely challenging physically and mentally," as injury continued to defy his comeback efforts.
The beautiful memories should now bring as much comfort as the sack of medals.
