Resch
Full Member
Modern football is all about maximizing and minimizing space and time on the pitch for your opponent and yourself. As a defending team you try to minimize space and time for your opponents, small distances and a maximum of stress. The attacking team needs quick reactions and precision. As an attacking team, you want to stress your opponent too, but you want to use the space between or behind the lines. To create such spaces, a team tries to move the ball fast, stretch and concentrate the defense to force them into errors. The heatmaps give us a clue, how a team creates or uses this space. Good teams have heatmaps which look like tridents or tongs. Ours looks like an arrow most of the time. We play through the middle, which allows our opponents to defend as a low block, without much movement. Our wings and fullbacks do not use the space on the wings enough, which causes a one-dimensional attacking game, makes us predictable. Antony always drifts inside, ball on his left foot. Our fullbacks overlap enough or do not get the ball. Sometimes, very rarely, we use the wings, we stretch the defense and many of these attacks are not useful, because our strikers are surprised, and we have not enough players in the box. But we can make such attacks, most of them are very dangerous, but they are massively underrepresented. Why?