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Originally Posted by Serenity Now
Blagger is absolutely correct when he distinguishes between tactical philosophy and formation. Although Van Gaal has always said that 1-4-3-3 is his favoured shape, he's nonetheless used a number of different formations during his career; his vision of football, on the other hand, has been essentially constant throughout.
To say that playing with two strikers is something new for Van Gaal is not correct. He used Berkamp as a shadow striker during the first two seasons at Ajax, he played with two strikers in three of his four seasons at AZ, including playing with two number nines to great effect, and he did it again at Bayern with Olic and Muller. (There's an interview from his days at AZ where he expounds a bit on his ideas about how the two strikers should move together.) At AZ he also played with the diamond in midfield. With Bayern he began with the idea of using the same system, with Ribery at the tip of the diamond, but the Frenchman wasn't happy to play centrally. Robben arrived soon after and Van Gaal was able to play with two wingers, ultimately in what he calls a 1-4-4-1-1.
With regards to three at the back, that's something he used at Ajax, at Barcelona, and at AZ. He even tried it at Bayern. Playing with wingbacks is something new for him, though, and only started in the Dutch preparation matches before the World Cup.
At United, Van Gaal arrived at a club without Carrick (lengthy injury) and without Blind (not signed till the end of August), meaning no midfield pivot, one unfit left fullback, a soon to be injured right fullback, lots of strikers (RVP, Rooney, Welbeck, Hernandez, Wilson), and multiple number 10s. Who plays left fullback with Shaw not fit? Young? A winger who's never played the position and who, needless to say, can't play on the wing if he's playing fullback? And who plays right fullback with Rafael injured? Valencia? Another winger down. Januzaj is still on holiday. That leaves one winger to work with: Nani.
So do you start developing a system with two wingers when you only have one winger available (and a winger Van Gaal apparently wasn't impressed with at that)? A system that provides you with an unbalanced midfield, and that means you leave four of your five strikers on the bench? Or do you perhaps opt for one that you've just coached successfully at international level, obtaining a high level of tactical organisation in just a few weeks, that can fit two of your strikers and a number 10, gives you two players for each wingback position, and provides protection against counter attacks without a midfield pivot. At the very least, I'd say it's one to consider.
I would also emphasise that although the Dutch played a counter-attacking style in Brazil, there's nothing inherently defensive about 3-5-2, just as there's nothing inherently attacking about 4-3-3. (When Van Gaal switched from 3-4-3/4-3-3 to the 4-4-2 diamond in his second year at AZ, it was claimed by many people in the Netherlands that he was turning defensive, like - quelle horreur - Dick Advocaat. A lot of people in the Netherlands think that 4-3-3 is synonymous with attacking football. AZ actually played a very attacking style and ended up scoring even more goals than they did in his first season. Conversely, from the English side, see Old Trafford echoing to chants of 4-4-2 back in 2005 or whenever it was.)
Guardiola, for instance, has used a 3-5-2 type system extensively this season at Bayern. It hasn't stopped them playing the positional game at the highest level of any club in the world. The fact that we weren't able to make it work very well doesn't mean that it can't work, or that it's just "£#%&!ing about". (I have to confess that I've never been a fan of 3-5-2, something I've discussed before on here on a few occasions, but if Louis van Gaal and Pep Guardiola, two of the top managers in the history of football, both arch exponents of the positional game, decide in the same season to experiment with a 3-5-2 shape, it's perhaps an indication that there's something interesting there.)
It also seems very clear - to me, at least - that we developed as a team whilst playing the 3-5-2. Our dominance of the ball increased almost linearly and the way the centre backs were playing a few months into the season, in particular, was worlds apart from how they were performing at the start. The defenders were essentially forced into playing Van Gaal football, as Siders has outlined. And our best performance of the first part of the season, the first half at Spurs - a match where better, even semi-competent, finishing would've seen us bury them - came with the 3-4-1-2.
(Something else worth noting, I think, is the fundamental similarity between the 3-4-1-2 and the 4-4-2 diamond. Essentially they're the same system, but with a defensive midfielder swapped in for the middle centre back and the fullbacks/wingbacks playing deeper. Generally in the 4-4-2 diamond one of the fullbacks will push forward while the other stays back, whereas with the 3-4-1-2 the idea is that the three central defenders allow you to push the two wingbacks forward at the same time. The other differences are relatively minor.
So when Blind arrived for the QPR match, United moved to the diamond with him as the pivot, but the tactical structure of the team really didn't change very much at all. The similarity between the two systems made this switch easy, despite the fact that the change was made following an international break, meaning there wasn't much time to develop the new system on the training ground.
To illustrate the point further, Juve have been playing both formations this season under Allegri, having previously played 3-5-2 with Conte. In the second leg of the last Champions League round, away at Dortmund, they swapped seamlessly from the 4-4-2 diamond to the 3-4-1-2 during the match. It was very impressive, to be sure, but it also provided a very clear demonstration of just how similar the two are.)
Formations are clear to see and easy to talk about, but they're far from the whole story. In this regard, I believe it's particularly notable that earlier this season we played essentially the same system we're currently using,. The result was five points from twelve versus West Brom, Chelsea, City, and Palace. Against West Brom, with Herrera and Mata as the interiors and Blind as the pivot, we were physically dominated. Fellaini came on for Herrera and rescued the match. Against City we struggled to play outside our own half, even before the sending off. We scored one goal against Palace. Same system, very different performance level.
To this end, I quote below from the book 'Pep Confidential' ('Herr Pep') by the Spanish journalist Martí Perarnau, who spent last season embedded with Bayern Munich, enjoying almost unrestricted access. (It's an exceptionally good book.)
“[The] concept of language learning will come up in conversation again and again this season. Guardiola uses it to describe a particular way of understanding football, both in terms of match strategy and training methodology. The coach makes a clear distinction between the notions of ‘the core idea’, ‘language’ and ‘people’.
“For him, ‘the core idea’ is the essence of a team and its coach. More than a single concept, it is the synthesis between a particular belief system and the group’s stated mission. It can be summed up in a phrase often used in Pep’s playing days by Johan Cruyff, the man who has been like a father figure to him in the course of his career: ‘The idea is to dominate the ball.’ ‘Language’ is the way in which the core idea is expressed on the pitch and is the culmination of a training regime which uses a range of systems, exercises and moves to reinforce understanding and mastery of the basic concepts.
"And finally, ‘people’. The quality of the ideas and the complexity of the language are of no consequence if your players are reluctant students. Essential though it may be, it is not merely sheer talent that matters here. The player must also be completely open to learning the secrets of the language, to practise them and make improvements where necessary. They must have complete faith in this process.
[...]
“To Guardiola, his job at Bayern Munich presents far greater challenges than those he encountered at Barça. There is a simple explanation for this. At Barça, the language of the game is taught from a very young age. Thousands of children pass through La Masia, the club’s youth academy, where they are taught the Barça language as defined by Johan Cruyff more than 25 years ago and implemented by a serious of great coaches since then. They learn the specific details of this unique and precise language. By the end they will have mastered this particular brand of football so that by the time a player has made it into the first team he will have accumulated more than 10,000 hours of practice and training in this single playing model. As such, he has become a fluent speaker of the language.” Martí Perarnau, 'Pep Confidential: The Inside Story of Pep Guardiola's First Season at Bayern' (Edinburgh: Arena Sport, 2014), 55-56.
This is Guardiola taking over a club in great condition and one that has followed a philosophy similar to his own, based around dominating possession through the positional game, since Van Gaal arrived there in 2009. At United, by contrast, Van Gaal took over a team that had just endured its worst season in decades, having been managed by someone who didn't have a clear idea of what he was doing, and that even in the glorious pre-Moyes years had played with, and had been coached according to, a fundamentally different approach to football.
Van Gaal also didn't arrive at United until halfway through July. A lot of players arrived even later still, following the World Cup, while others didn't join until the middle or even the very end of August. Nor was there a secluded training camp for Van Gaal and his staff to begin their work, but rather a coast-to-coast tour of the USA that began almost immediately upon his arrival and didn't end until August. So a lot of the work that would typically be done over an extended period during pre-season now had to be done at a much accelerated pace, with double training sessions and the consequent fatigue, and then continued in the midst of competitive football. (With the consequent 48-72 hours of recovery time after every match and the need for another 48-72 hour window after any high intensity work done before matches.) Throughout this period, players had to be assessed, with a large number consequently leaving the club, either permanently or on loan. Then there was the injury crisis to contend with.
For me, it's hardly surprising, then, that an extremely demanding manager, a manager who has a vision that he seeks to impose, who asks his players to rethink how they play football from the ground up and then requires this new "conscious competence" to become automatic and unconscious excellence, who even in much more favourable circumstances has taken the better part of half a year to get his previous teams to understand his "core idea", his "football language ", his "philosophy", should take a long time to get things functioning at the desired level.
During the USA tour last summer, the players looked very comfortable with the new approach: playing the ball out from the back cleanly, good positional play, high ball circulation, aggressive and intelligent pressing, etc. It all seemed extremely promising. Even Van Gaal himself was surprised by how quickly they seemed to pick it up. Yet, as soon as the competitive matches began, with the intensity increasing and the spaces becoming smaller, many of those same players appeared completely lost. The passing options were marked a little tighter, the pressure arrived a little sooner, they had a fraction of a second less to read the situation, decide what action to take and execute technically. (As Cruyff put it, "a good player who needs too much time can suddenly become a poor player.”) In top level football, particularly in a country where the football is as quick as it is in England, you simply don't have time to constantly think about what you're doing. Under stress, you revert back to instinct, to what you're comfortable with; or even worse, you're caught between what your instincts are demanding and what your conscious mind is telling you you're supposed to be doing. You make technical errors. For a style of football like Van Gaal's, one that requires constant decision making on the ball and highly structured movement off it, this is disastrous.
So the movements, the decision making, all have to be drilled constantly. Drilled until the automatisms emerge, until "conscious competence" becomes "unconscious competence", as he put it recently. This is what Van Gaal's coaching is all about. When he started at Barcelona, Van Gaal would drill his players on third man movements every day. Day after day. Guardiola, then Van Gaal's captain, tried to convince Van Gaal that he, and the rest of the Barca players, understood the concept very well. Van Gaal kept drilling. He wanted it to be completely automatic: this one runs here, that one runs there, the ball is played like this. A football machine. Exactly what he achieved at Ajax. Guardiola, of course, now takes a very similar approach:
“Pep trains obsessively on how to bring the ball out from the back... He’ll do this every four or five games. He puts the keeper, the back four and the midfield on the pitch and walks them through the kind of movements he wants them to make automatic. He repeats this over and again so that they take it in fully. At Barcelona not two weeks went by without him doing exactly this. Here at Bayern it will be almost the same. Every 15 days, in detail, as if they were preparing for an exam.” Martí Perarnau, 'Pep Confidential: The Inside Story of Pep Guardiola's First Season at Bayern' (Edinburgh: Arena Sport, 2014), 145.
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15-04-2015, 07:38 AM
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