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+---- Thread: Breaking the triangle pt2 (/showthread.php?tid=1761)
- Sermokala - 2022-06-18
Last week I went through a bit of why having a winger or at least some wide stretching of the opponent's defensive shape is important. This week will be about the vertical stretching of the shape. Now it may seem geometrical that having a winger would both vertically and horizontally stretch a defensive shape, but it doesn't really. Instead a horizontal stretch just causes the shape to move backwards a little. You still need to break into it and pass through it.
Now ofc this is mostly a strikers article. The great diacomety of strikers comes from the very first split of attacking thought. This however isn't the Scottish-English split of basic soccer principles this is an English-Hungarian split. The best Striker in history (sorry ronaldo/messi) learned that if he dropped back a little he would be able to pick up the ball and then move around the other team to score. The issue with this however is that as time has gone by defensive shapes have become dynamic and fluid, due to the dutch mostly. The soviets (Ukrainian soviets) figured that soccer was about space and shape and prepared accordingly. This brought back the concept of a forward that was "advanced".
Now to make this easier to understand for FM terms we have the split of the AF (Advanced forward) TF (new target man is just called target forward to not be gendered but also make more sense from a descriptive standpoint) the Poacher vs the DLF (deep-lying forward) the F9 (false 9) and the T (trequartista). the CF (complete forward) Operates in a really weird space of being both at the same time. This isn't to say that they don't also go forward or don't drop back to pick up the ball but these positions are a lot more focused on how they attack the defensive shape of the other team vertically. The Poacher is specifically trying to sit on the shoulder of the last defender to get long balls. the Advanced forward, especially in tandem, has the intent of a poacher in inducing through balls but is just as happy to accept the ball to provide a line-breaking pass in their own right. The Target forward does the same as an Advanced forward but instead is more intent in winning a duel for the ball when it receives it rather than being in a spot where it doesn't need to win the ball. False 9's explicitly stay behind the forward line while the deep-lying forwards move with the flow while dropping back a little to be able to receive the ball while the other team's centerbacks are dropping back in advance.
Now to go further into the explicit differences with the AF/poacher and DLF/False 9 roles would require an explanation of Soviet geometric philosophy of sport while having a long aside about why we have offsides.
OK so to put things simply, the soviet union and the west were operating under different internal philosophies about life and how they looked at the world. One was communist-socialist and the other was democratic-capitalist while using some socialist influences to avoid the state of their economies pre-world wars. I'm not going to touch into the political base these viewpoints come from but to give a viewport into pandora's box yes fascism is inside of some soccer cultures but I'm not going to let that leak in. The primitive splits of strikers is the poacher and the deep-lying forward, at least once we get to the stage of formations. The first high line comes from the offside rule from the start. It used to be 3 players in the rule that you couldn't be beyond for offsides. However, a manager saw the issue with this and pushed his defensive line higher and higher up the field until it became a farce. This was why you only need two players beyond you to not be offsides, because then you only need to beat one defender (the goalie being the other player). It was the dutch that began the practice of "make the field bigger for you and smaller than the other team" but the soviets have always seen the game as a more collective action than even "total football" (it even might have derived from soviet thought as I believe but I'm not sure). What you get as a philosophical component from this is the effective ideal that it is the collective action to break the enemy's defensive shape in the abstract while still contributing to the team in the immediate. Now OOF we're getting way past anything to connect this to football so let's explain how this works.
The poacher is there to sit on the shoulder of the last defender, he focuses on breaking the offsides trap and running into space with the ball onto goal. An advanced forward is looking to do the same thing but more importantly is not on the shoulder of the last defender but instead being near them. What this means in effect however is that the centerbacks become trapped in their own right by having to answer questions without knowing what the question is. Is that striker going to have the ball go past me or is the striker going to get the ball in front of me? Is the ball that the striker going to get in front of me going to be passed in turn past me? The last defender has to decide to either react to the ball being passed by judging if this is an action done by the striker himself or is a part of collective action by the other team. This last defender now has to keep an eye on the attacking shape and the other attackers while also keeping an eye on the striker that they are marking. The striker by being an Advanced forward, instead of a poacher, has to only keep an eye on the ball and the last defender. The last defender in this however needs to only be in peripheral vision to see where they are in relation to them. They don't need to judge immediately where or how they are moving. They don't need to judge if what the last defender is doing is a part of collective action or an individual action when the individual action is the only thing it needs to consider.
This is a question that was being asked during the soviet union. It's 2022 as the writing of this article so we generally have the answer to these questions, It's worse to be burned than to burn. If the defender cannot intercept the ball, or has doubts about another free attacker, they will back up and start running to their goal. It is better to have the striker have the ball in front of you rather than between you and the goal. It is better to be burning rather than to have been burnt.
Yes soccer is fluid and the dots move but what this means in effect (and I'll get to zonal vs man-marking at some point so calm down jiggly) is that the center back(s) has to move in relation to the advanced forward instead of in relation to the defensive shape. Lateral movement from the advanced forward (not to be confused with horizontal movement as this is just movement in the box effectively) doesn't allow for 1-to-1 movement of the center back because, in vague geometric terms, A triangle has a flat side facing away from any of the points. In this last explination, the advanced forward is the point on a triangle and the goal is the flat side.
All this to say that an advanced forward has a greater tactical value to its job, if it can do that job, to the collective attacking action than the benefits that a deep-lying forward has in value for the individual.
Next week I'll be doing an article explaining what you can do with stretching the field vertically or horizontally or one or neither. I probably will have to break that up into different articles about midfielders and striker/wingers concerning these principles.
For a teaser, I have penciled out time for our lord and tactical savior strikerless.