They Came To Defend

How many times have you heard that excuse used after a football match when the expected winners coudn't break an opponents defence down? What do they expect? The people involved on either side of a football match are partisan, their jobs are to do what's best for their team, not offer themselves up to be beaten to fit the accepted order of things. It's often the large teams with a world class squad of players who use this excuse when upset by a much smaller team who's squad costs less then one international player.

If you are the manager of a team, it's your job to study and predict your opponents tactics, as well as find some way to nullify their weapons and find gaps to exploit. If you go out to attack you will be turned over, ending in a rout. You have no option but to play to what you have. This means defending very heavily and relying on the odd set piece or break out to get a shot at goal, in the hopes that something will fall for you.

By the same token, if you are on the other side of this, as the manager of a large team it's your duty to plan for this tactic as many teams will employ it against you. It's your job to plan and prepare ways of enticing players out of position, making gaps and exploiting them. You know you won't have to rely too much on defence as your opponents will spend most of the game camped in their half of the pitch, and when they do break out it'll be hasty and not well supported, with players likely to be rushed into taking a shot believing they may only get one in the game.

There's every chance the occasion can be used to your advantage especially if you're the home team, as well as the awe of the star players on the pitch. Football players are also football fans, they watch the same top class football as the fans do and are entertained by the top players and their abilities. So you have hero worship working on your favour that they have to overcome.

Using the "they came to defend" excuse only shows that they won. They got the tactics right on the day and you failed to deal with them. It's one thing for two relatively well matched teams to end up like this, where you expected something different in the match and had to adapt and balance things. It's something different when a much smaller team plays you and you know this is going to happen, yet you still fail to deal with it.

In other words, build this into training and tactics planning. Add the ability to prise open an over defensively minded tactic to your repertoire and stop making excuses. Professional players in professional teams with professional training facilities can spend as long as they need to add, practice and hone this ability.