.png)
2 hours ago
1
If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. If the only tool you have is a set play, the solution to everything starts to look like a pre-programmed move based on blocking runs. And perhaps that’s especially true if you’re worn out, knackered by the attrition of a persistent schedule of two games a week against teams who are frustratingly well organised and physically imposing. Think? Dribble? Make a surprising run? Who has the bandwidth for that? Just sling it to the back post and get in the way of the keeper.
Arne Slot had spoken in the buildup to Liverpool’s defeat by Galatasaray on Tuesday of how difficult it is to create chances in modern football, and how set pieces are a way to circumvent the sophisticated defensive setups of most Premier League teams. He is certainly not alone in taking that approach in the Premier League. But the Champions League is not like the Premier League. The crowding of the six-yard box, the full bearhug grappling, the meat wall to block the goalkeeper … it turns out all of those are penalised by European referees, and that is a problem for Premier League teams.
Those fears about English domination of Europe look a little overblown after a chastening week for Premier League clubs: played six, won none. But the pattern of English clubs being, to use Michel Platini’s phrase, lions in the winter and lambs in the spring is not unfamiliar.
The Premier League is by some way the most demanding in Europe. English sides habitually bully mid-ranking foreign sides, or even the elite if they are not quite at their peak, but with the accumulated fatigue of three-quarters of a Premier League season they find it rather harder. That’s not simply a question of the number of games, but the quality. Wolves may be bottom of the Premier League but they are the 29th-richest club in the world by revenue; they present far more of a challenge than, say, Real Oviedo or Heidenheim.
But this past week felt different. It’s one round of matches in which five of the Premier League sides played away and it would be wrong to read too much into that. Each game can be analysed and specific reasons found for the result. Tottenham are going through a moment and individual errors had them 3-0 down inside 15 minutes. Chelsea matched Paris Saint-Germain until a goalkeeping howler put them 3-2 down and, chasing the game, they leaked two more.
Manchester City, with a weirdly open midfield, ran into a Real Madrid side benefiting from the absence of several of the stars who typically unbalance the side, allowing the underrated and self-sacrificing Fede Valverde to have the game of his life. Liverpool yet again conceded to their opponent’s first real attack. Newcastle had the beating of Barcelona but gave away a daft last-minute penalty.
What was striking, though, was how their opponents’ expansiveness seemed to befuddle English sides, as though Premier League teams have become so used to the crabbed nature of the modern domestic game, all intense pressing and intricate marking structures, that the idea of players running at pace, rapid flurries of passes or forwards performing tricks no longer computes, as though stop-start, disjointed football has become the default, that fluency seems like some devastating alien invention. What works against the very good turns out to be inadequate against the very best.
Trying to second-guess the psychology of referees is a pursuit probably as futile as the league phase. But certainly the impression in Istanbul was that the Spanish referee, Jesús Gil Manzano, was very aware of the practices of Premier League clubs at set plays and was primed to look for offences – which, of course, he found, because they are there at every set play. Slot, not unreasonably, queried how Gil had missed Virgil van Dijk being dragged down at the near post, but that’s the problem with being from a league that has become notorious for wrestling at set pieces; referees are primed to see your fault.
If this is some directive to prevent the Champions League going the way of the Premier League – the directive being nothing more sinister than to enforce the laws – it’s probably overdue. English football has got itself into a situation in which playing for set pieces probably is the most profitable approach largely because grappling is now permitted, seen most egregiously in the way Declan Rice got away with a handball against Chelsea because he was engaged in wrapping his arms around Jarel Hato, that now considered such a normal position that it could not possibly be penalised.
But the question then is why, if it is, as Slot says, so hard to create chances in the modern game, so many foreign teams seemed to find it so easy against Premier League sides this week. None of the six English sides kept a clean sheet, two of them let in five and one let in three. Can it really just be that the set-piece obsession has reached such a pitch that an opponents deviating from that model causes synapses to short-circuit? Or that teams have convinced themselves that set plays are the only way to attack?
It feels as though the Premier League has, en masse, become subject to some invidious group-think. Perhaps, stranded on the darkling plain in these confused days after faith in Guardiola-style passing football has waned, any light looks like a beacon to be followed. In the wilderness, any path is a good path, wherever it might be going. Perhaps there is even some comfort to be found for English football in plunging back into familiar tropes from the 1980s; could it be perhaps that we were right all along? But a herd mentality is not necessarily correct just because lots of people follow it.
The emperor has been promenading naked around his technical area, initials somehow stencilled on his chest, brandishing an iPad and directing set-piece moves and everybody has accepted his great wisdom, until the impudent child of a Champions League last-16 opponent has pointed scornfully and blurted: “But that’s just over-liberal refereeing at an inswinging corner.”
Scales should have fallen from eyes this week, for the whole of English football culture. The question, then, is how it responds.
