Everyone who
follows the world of soccer, specially the more competitive leagues has
witnessed the same repetitive garbage that almost always ends up in disaster. We
are talking of a team winning by a small difference or drawing a match that
they have controlled for 70-80 minutes and decides to defend with 11 players
close to their own goal in a way defined by the media as “putting the game in
the freezer”. Then the opponents, which have been the weakest team for most of
the game, go on the attack desperately and tied or win the match in overtime.
Last year victory
of Real Madrid vs Atletico in the finals of the Champions League is one of the
many examples of such bad coaching by the “practical” coaches who are scared to
play. In the Argentine first division league that I follow every week, I
counted 36 of such situations during the last season and already 20 in the current season (and I only watched ¾ of
the league games). For example, CA Tigre, the club where I played in the 1960s,
lost innumerable valuable points by using such “safe defensive modality” by ignoring the old soccer axiom: “The best defense is a good offense”. Tigre was managed by 3 different coaches in the last 18 months and all did the same (or perhaps the players did it despite the instructions given by the coaches)
If you play
to defend back too close to your own goal, you will most probably loose.
Victory is the reward for those who want to win and make the effort to score.
Sometimes, for multiple reasons such as tiredness, men down, injuries, etc you
cannot attack all the time but you must defend with intelligence and far away
from your own goal as the US MNT did when Landon Donovan was there. Our good friend JLo knows that, but unfortunately not some of our players and coaches
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