It’s one thing to go out, play to your manager’s orders and get results. It’s an entirely separate thing to go out and score great goals.
And when those two come together, you have perfect football. This doesn’t happen too often – playing to your manager’s orders is often associated with defensive, negative football –...
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If Sam Allardyce had a footballer-making machine, and wanted to create a centre-back, you get the feeling he’d produce something along the lines of Christopher Samba. 6′4, brave, consistent, unfussy and completely dominant in the air.
Quietly, Blackburn have crept into the top half of the table, although they do have a very bad defensive...
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In part one we looked at passing, in part two we looked at crossing. For the final instalment, we will look at what football is all about – goals.
Firstly, a simple statistic – the average number of goals per game in the five leagues:
The only major surprise here is that the Premiership is so far...
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There’s some debate about who first used the 4-2-3-1 formation that became so popular across Europe in the 2000s. It probably started its development in the mid-90s, and some would point to Manchester United of 1994 as a forerunner, and perhaps Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal side and Real Madrid under John Toshack have claims to...
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Although this doesn’t directly concern on-field tactics, the concept of squad rotation has become almost mandatory for the top sides in Europe, and has a large impact on the team selection of the managers concerned.
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