The Premier League might be the wealthiest and most powerful division in the great game, but with that, it seems to have developed a hopeless devotion to the hottest new trends being flaunted in the footballsphere.
So ready to seem in-the-know with whichever ‘New Age’ is being fostered by Barca, Bayern or Dortmund, and so keen to borrow the mentality of these more successful European counterparts.
First we adopted tiki-taka as the way to play the game, Arsenal especially, as they went from being Invincibles to Trophylessers. All out pressing is now the brand, and Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool team nearly snatched their first title in 20 odd years with a high octane game, but then Steven Gerrard didn’t press his foot in the turf, slipped and Demba Ba ruined the party in Merseyside.
That’s just taking into consideration the domestic titles. Europe is even bleaker.
Chelsea and Man Utd are the only teams to win the Champions League since the tiki-take age started to dictate to EPL teams that there is apparently only one way to play football at any given time. Man Utd needed a Paul Scholes 25-yarder to edge out a Frank Rijkaard Barca outfit (not quite as trendy as the incoming Pep brand), and then to play another English team in a very English finale.
Chelsea was the interesting one, because they actually played like the English team they were. Strength in defence, frustrate the better teams, play on the counter and have a big man up top. Didier Drogba may well be most complete centre forward we’ve seen in the UK and he was worth his considerable bulk in Roman Abramovich gold that campaign. It was Savile Row stuff – understated and timeless.
Then nothing was to prepare us for the show stopping, season-long strut of Leicester City to the Premier League crown last year. How English do you want to get? 4-4-2, Schmeichel in net, two monster central defenders, an old fashioned water-carrying centre mid called Drinkwater and a former factory worker up front. They played with pace on the wings, classy crossing, hit teams on the break and could tear you apart, as well as grind you down.
But while fate is seemingly in the midst of an underdog love-in following this victory (Brexit, the Cubs and Trump), the Premier League elite doesn’t believe you can be acceptable on the European high-street in UK clobber.
So we’re back to copy-catting, with the new must have item being one of these trendy managers who play this trendy football.
Jose Mourinho came back, because he is seemingly like a pair of jeans and never out of fashion, and brought Pogba Delevingne with him. Antonio Conte, Jurgen Klopp and then the House of Guardiola brought showmanship to the glitzy lights of Manchester – the home of the expensive toys and haute football.
Furthermore, now we’ve ousted the unfashionably British Rodgers out of the league, we can now call the high-pressing football he adopted Gegenpressen, because we have a Klopp to validate our wholehearted adoption of a foreign style. This is all we’ve ever wanted – an italicised style of our own, albeit a thoroughly borrowed one.
And therein lies the problem, because while we’re too busy buying the new style of football from Europe, the rest of the continent is already figuring out how to beat it.
The suggestion is not that we need to rewind the clock to ‘getting stuck-in’, ‘lumping it up top’ and other atavistic tactics, but why no gradual approach? Alex Ferguson was the master of this, drip feeding new learnings into his team, evolution instead of revolution, and see what works. “Cristiano Ronaldo? Yes you work, we’ll keep you. Eric Djemba-Djemba, Kleberson and the very trendy Veron? No you don’t seem to work, we’ll leave you out.”
But, who’s got time to bed in a new manager and evolve a style with this amount of money and fame up for grabs? The required immediacy of success our hungry owners crave won’t wait. Not even for the likes of Carlo Ancelloti, who won a League and FA Cup Double then got the sack, only for pretty much his Chelsea team to cling on and win the Champions League the following year.
What this means for English football is several things. The 24-year wait for an English manager to win the Premier League looks set to continue. Only Sean Dyche’s Burnley are in the top ten currently with an Englishman at the helm. English football will always tactically lag behind European football and finally, and most sadly for this Englishman, the national team will continue to not know whether it’s pressing or passing it’s way to an abject tournament exit.
Viva 4-4-2.
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