With Galatasaray 1-0 down to Chelsea in their Champions League last-16 tie, the Turks’ manager Roberto Mancini took the unusual step of changing his playing personnel just 31 minutes into the contest. Young Bosnian winger Izet Hajrovic was hauled off for rugged midfielder Yekta Kurtulus. It was a switch that necessitated an adjustment to the roles of all bar the back-four of the Turkish side’s outfield players.
The result of Mancini’s tinkering, a consequence of the Italian’s belief that, during the opening half-an-hour, his men had stood passively in awe of the 2012 winners, was a surge in tempo and renewed positivity – the London club eventually happy to escape Istanbul with a 1-1 draw.
Didier Drogba, Gala’s centre-forward, and one of the men affected by his boss’s early re-jig, had spoken earlier in the week of the necessity for footballers at the top level to quickly adapt to new demands. Furthermore said the Ivorian, players should be capable of independent thought, and possess the ability ‘to read the game, to change a game or a situation on our own on the pitch’.
This doctrine, unsurprisingly, was passed down to Drogba and his former Chelsea team-mates during Jose Mourinho’s first spell in charge at Stamford Bridge between 2004 and 2007. The Portuguese’s aptitude for instilling a sense of personal responsibility in each individual under his charge is credited by Drogba for the Blues’ continuing success in the wake of the twice Premier League winning boss’s departure.
‘In the team, we had a group of 24, sometimes 26 players, and 20 of them could have been captain of their national teams. We had a mentality that was then improved by (Guus) Hiddink (manager at Stamford Bridge for a three month spell in 2009).
‘He always said to us, “You have to challenge yourself and challenge your team-mates to perform”.
‘But I think in this team we had a lot of clever players. They could understand and quickly take in instructions very fast. Within one meeting we could watch a video for 10 minutes and know what we have to do.
‘We were lucky to have managers who gave us a certain education so it was easy for us to understand’.
In opposition to Drogba on Wednesday was Frank Lampard, living evidence of how valuable a commodity a potent football brain is. Renowned through the majority of his career for a buccaneering, energetic style, the 35 year-old has re-invented himself as a sitting midfielder. Lampard’s renaissance saw him expertly fulfilling that specialist duty when his team defied the odds to lift the Champions League trophy in Munich two years ago.
In similar fashion, Steven Gerrard seems sure to be around for some time yet after responding in terrific style to a switch in position. No longer the marauding, carefree, all-action phenomenon of his twenties, Gerrard now patrols the area in front of the back-four for both Liverpool and England. Ryan Giggs, the standard bearer for footballers striving to hold back time, has effortlessly taken on hitherto untried tasks more in keeping with his ageing legs.
It isn’t only when a player reaches his thirties however, that he must embrace the need for an open mind. Mourinho already considers his 23 year-old winger Eden Hazard to be the ‘best young player in the world’, but nevertheless insists that the Belgian has a long way to go before he can be compared to ‘monsters’ Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. The Iberian superstars have been performing to stratospheric levels for a decade.
If Hazard is to scale similar heights, and maintain his form over such an elongated period, he needs to develop the ability to sense for himself what a match situation requires of him. Ronaldo’s former colleague at Manchester United, Gary Neville, is fulsome in his praise for the Real Madrid man’s instinct, saying:
‘He sniffs blood, he will find the weakness in the back four. If he’s not getting the left-back in the first 15 minutes, he’ll switch to the right-back. If he’s not getting the right-back, he’ll switch to the left centre-back. He’ll find someone in your back four who is weak and doesn’t like defending one on one and against pace and power.’
A current United player, Robin van Persie, was audibly frustrated after his own side’s European encounter this week, complaining in the wake of a miserable 2-0 defeat at Olympiacos that ‘team-mates are often in the area where I want to play’.
That comment might be a veiled criticism of the tactics adopted by Red Devils’ manager David Moyes. Whatever the validity of his words, Van Persie has the experience and knowhow to fine-tune his approach for the good of the collective. All the Dutchman is lacking, is the will to respond to the moment.
The same is true of a good deal of the players at West Bromwich Albion. This discontented group is reportedly railing against the demands of their new manager Pepe Mel. The Spaniard’s preferred high-pressing game hasn’t sat comfortably with a team that was 14th, three points above the relegation zone, and had won one of its 11 previous matches when the new man took over. Rather than be enthused by fresh ideas, the insular Baggies’ squad has rebelled against change.
Resistance to unfamiliar challenges, or a simple inability to conform to different strategies, is a failure that has most commonly been levelled at English footballers.
The success of Mauricio Pochettino, another foreign manager undertaking his first appointment in the Premier League, makes a lie of that theory. The Argentine arrived at Southampton and, without prejudice towards a players’ age or nationality, identified the men best suited to pursue the style that Mel is labouring to implement at the Hawthorns.
It is a little over 12 months since Pochettino brought his enterprising, relentlessly fast-paced philosophy to the South Coast. In that time, Adam Lallana, Rickie Lambert, Jay Rodriguez and, now, Luke Shaw, all multi-faceted, dynamic performers, have become members of Roy Hodgson’s England squad.
On the flip side, even with John Terry retired and his fellow defenders Phil Jagielka and Phil jones injured, there was never the merest suggestion that Micah Richards would win a call up to the thirty-man party named by Hodgson this week for an impending friendly clash with Denmark.
That particular omission isn’t one that will take much explaining to Mancini. Having asked his Manchester City side to switch to a back-three in a Champions League game at Ajax, the former Inter Milan boss watched on as, from being on level terms at 1-1 when the alteration was made, they slumped to a 3-1 reverse. Richards, part of City’s defence in Amsterdam on that night in October 2012, was in no doubt about why they had surrendered three points.
‘It is something that we’ve not worked on a lot. We’re used to a straight four and it’s twice we’ve gone to a back five and conceded, but the manager likes it and if we want to do well we’re going to have to work on it a little bit more.
‘The players just want to play. It’s a hard system because we’re not used to it, but I think the players prefer a 4-4-2, but he’s the manager and we do what he says’.
His reaction to being asked to think on his feet perhaps hints at why Richards has fallen from a player whose teenage breakthrough prompted predictions of a long international future, to rarely seen City substitute.
On a similar note, Gus Poyet, speaking otherwise effusively about Adam Johnson in the lead up to his Sunderland outfit’s League Cup final appearance this weekend, mentioned that the winger ‘can’t just go into any system and just play’.
Johnson, despite a recent series of stellar displays, missed out on an England recall this week. That fate will not befall Manchester United’s Jones when he recaptures full fitness. Hodgson, in common with Sir Alex Ferguson when he was still at the Old Trafford helm, greatly values Jones’ versatility. Far from empathising with the mystifying bellyaching that accompanies the 22 year-old’s gift for functioning across a broad range of roles, both managers appreciate having such a pliable talent at their disposal.
The margins at the top level of football are reducing all the time. Managers, therefore, are constantly seeking new ways to gain an advantage. Regardless of their insight, without responsive, receptive players, they are condemned to helplessness.
Drogba, Ronaldo, Gerrard, Lampard and Southampton’s exciting English quartet have all set the correct example. It is one that West Brom’s players, now ensconced one point and one place above the Premier League’s bottom three, and Micah Richards, with all his unfulfilled promise, would be well advised to heed.
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