How two drubbings could change Australian football

 
Davidde Corran Columnist

By , 22 May 2009 Davidde Corran is a Roar Expert

Tagged:
 , , , , , ,

22 Have your say

Related coverage




Adelaide United's Sasa Ognenovski beats Masato Yamazaki of Gamba Osaka to the ball during the Asian Champions League final match in Adelaide, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008. AAP Image/Rob Hutchison

Adelaide United's Sasa Ognenovski beats Masato Yamazaki of Gamba Osaka to the ball during the Asian Champions League final match in Adelaide, Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008. AAP Image/Rob Hutchison

Australian club football is tactically naive. It’s a bold statement and it would appear some within the Australian football community would prefer it not to be said. But I mean it solely as a constructive point.

The space you’ll often find left in A-League games can be astonishing. Often, the only time the space between the midfield line and the defensive line is condensed is when a side is under so much pressure both lines merge and sit on the edge of the penalty box together.

With the group stage of the Asian Champions League over, I think now is a good time to reflect on this. Especially since A-League teams have been humiliated by Japanese teams in the Asian Champions League twice.

In both instances, five goals were the difference.

First Adelaide United were humbled by Gamba Osaka 5-0 on aggregate over two legs in last year’s Asian Champions League final.

Then the Central Coast Mariners were belted by a similar score line in only 90 minutes in a group game last month.

When looking for answers as to why these defeats happened, there have been many suggestions and just as many excuses.

These include Japanese clubs having no salary cap, the youth development systems at J-League clubs being better and that the J-League is so much older and better established then the A-League.

That is to name but a few. We’ve heard these reasons repeated as often as Christiano Ronaldo does step overs.

Naturally, these factors no doubt contributed to those results but there’s something they don’t explain.

Why, after both 5-0 drubbings, did Adelaide and the Central Coast then put in much more convincing performances the next time they met their opponents?

In these following games, both Adelaide and the Mariners probably deserved something from their one-goal defeats.

So, how in just a matter of days and weeks, did they bridge this gap?

Clearly the A-League salary cap didn’t just expand as exponentially as a waistline on Christmas day, nor did Andre Grumprect turn into Michael Ballack overnight.

The answer is tactics.

On returning from Japan after their follow up match against Kawasaki Frontale, Central Coast’s Andrew Clark revealed to The World Game that coach Lawrie McKinna had directed the players to close down Kawasaki at every opportunity.

When they didn’t have the ball, the Mariners hunted in packs. The structure of the side that McKinna set out was more compact as well.

If you watched that game, you may have noticed the Mariners players double pressing their opponents. Every time a Kawasaki player was on the ball two or three yellow shirts surrounded him.

Similarly in Adelaide’s game against Gamba at the Club World Cup, the Reds condensed the space between their lines. They squeezed Gamba and didn’t allow them the space to play.

Afterwards, the Gamba players told a colleague of mine, Scott McIntyre, in doing this Adelaide had caught them off guard.

Arguably the last man to reinvent the wheel in terms of football tactics was Arrgio Sacchi.

When reflecting on his time at Real Madrid as sporting director with author of Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics Jonathon Wilson, Sacchi famously emphasised the point that the goal of tactics is to multiply the potential and ability of a team’s players.

“There was no project; it was about exploiting qualities,” he said. “So, for example, we knew that Zidane, Raúl and Figo didn’t track back, so we had to put a guy in front of the back four who would defend. But that’s reactionary football. It doesn’t multiply the players’ qualities exponentially. Which actually is the point of tactics: to achieve this multiplier effect on the players’ abilities.”

This “multiplier effect” is what we saw in action with Adelaide and Central Coast when they faced their J-League opponents the second time round.

This isn’t just a solution for playing on the continent. Can you imagine the success an Australian club would have if they took this approach into the A-League?

Very few, if any, A-league teams have the passing game, let alone tactical sophistication, to break down such a set up.

The truth is that a coach of an A-League club will clue in to this eventually.

When someone finally does this and takes the competition by storm, I’m certain the following year the other clubs will be forced to follow suit.

This natural tactical evolution will go a long way to solving the problem of returning Socceroos jeopardising their international chances. Just ask Pim Verbeek.

“Tactically and technically superior” were the poignant words from Aurelio Vidmar about winners Gamba Osaka after the Asian Champions League final last year.

It might be too late for this generation of players to learn the second part of that equation but as the Mariners and Adelaide proved on Japanese soil, it’s never too late to learn tactics.

When this happens, the benefits for the game at home will be massive.

Get a daily football email

Our daily emails are only sent if there is content for the sport. You can subscribe to multiple daily emails; or get the daily Roar email with all our content in it.

We value privacy. More.