Gio Reyna v Zenit


Zenit sat in a block. Gio Reyna was one of three Dortmund attackers playing underneath their striker, Haaland, and they were all working to break it down. The three — Reyna, Reus, and Sancho — would drift together through the narrow corridor between Zenit’s back and midfield lines. Reus was most often the central of the three. Reyna and Sancho took turns being on his right and left. Often they tried to keep it sort of narrow, particularly Reyna, and particularly on the right. They’d each move vertically too, mostly dropping back to pick up the ball, dribbling or passing central, or wide, or, if neither of those were in the cards, they'd circulate it to the other side through the midfield.

So it was Reyna, Reus, and Sancho underneath Haaland, all moving about in what seemed a well rehearsed plan of keeping sensible relation to one another, while, at each their own discretion, they made sub-movements within and across pockets of space. The aim of all this was to set things just right so one of them could receive a pass behind Zenit’s midfield line, then quickly combine to put another one of them behind into the short patch between the back line and the keeper. And then obviously at that point the idea would be to kick it in the goal.

It didn’t work as well as maybe it sounds like it might have now that I’m reading all that back. The Zenit block held pretty strong up until near the end. The few moments where Reyna could have broken the game open earlier (but in the end, as you’ll see, didn’t) often needed to come in transition or semi-transition:




So those were his near successes. You could also choose to think of some of them as failures, but I don’t. I’ve heard enough trustworthy people say that the important thing is getting yourself in the position in the first place, and that execution doesn’t matter at all. 


The Rest of the Game


The rest of the game was tedious. I could recount things that Reyna did during it, but I don’t know that that’s going to do any of us any good. If you're interested in more detail about his performance, though, what I’ve done -- and before you ask why, I’m telling you I don’t know why -- is I’ve taken the game and edited out all the dead-ball moments and some other clutter, fast-forwarded at 2x any time that Reyna isn’t on the screen, and added a bunch of arrows showing you where Reyna is when he comes back on the screen. For some reason I started doing it and then kept going. I've been taking a break from making comps, but it hasn't been going well at all. If anything I’m spending more time editing soccer videos than I was before the break started. 

Part 1 



Part 2



Part 3



Jesse Marsch was dealt disappointment in Madrid

Jesse Marsch’s first head coaching job was in Montreal, and it was not a success. He’d later say he hadn’t really figured out who he was as a coach, and that he’d been more or less just doing a Bob Bradley impression. So before taking another job, he went on a six month backpacking trip with his wife and three kids through southeast Asia, northern Africa, parts of the Middle East, and finally Europe (You can read a more detailed itinerary on the MLS website). It was during the Europe part that he first learned of a competition called The Champions League, and made it his dream to one day lift the giant chalice given to its winner.


Red Bull Salzburg loses bravely to Atlético Madrid


As you are no doubt aware, Jesse Marsch has come a long way since his family backpacking trip. He’s now the highly regarded coach of Red Bull Salzburg, and yesterday they faced Atlético Madrid.

Unfortunately, his star striker, Patson Daka, went down with a hamstring in the 27th minute, which is why they only had ten men on the field a minute later when Atlético broke through to make it 1-0. Salzburg fought back to tie it before halftime, and then pulled ahead dramatically right after the break. But in the end, Atlético was too good and too experienced. The Spanish masters won three goals to two, effectively ending any realistic hope for a Salzburg Cinderella lifting of the beautiful and beguiling silver urn.

The real story, though, particularly for Americans cheering his ambitious return to Europe, was that Marsch’s team had been courageous in defeat. The internet was ablaze yet again in adulation for this manager on the rise. Let’s take a quick look at some Salzburg tactics from the game to start to try understanding Marsch’s philosophy.


Pressing from a 4-2-3-1


Salzburg defended in a 4-2-3-1 formation. Imagine the 1, the striker, as being focused on sort of corralling Atlético’s possession to one side of the field. As he’s doing that he’s joined by two players from the 3 (the central player and the nearside wide one). Together they trap the Atlético player on the ball (normally a fullback). This isn’t about containment though, they’re actually trying to win the ball off him to go to goal. It’s about being fast and aggressive. Sprint, arrive, and run through it.

The Marsch family’s favorite thing from the Europe part of their backpacking trip was seeing how fast they could get through art museums. They’d plan over breakfast, but in the moment you see a room and attack it, then the next Marsch follows, then the next, and so on.





And it was basically the same idea with the Salzburg pressing scheme against Atlético. Since the front line of Salzburg pressers are going in very serious about trying to win the ball, they can’t be overly worried about the passing lanes that might open up as a result. They’re counting on their teammates behind them to come with them and fill the gaps.





Now this particular press didn’t work out -- partly because they (Salzburg) couldn’t move the possession all the way to the sideline. In general Atlético did a pretty good job of avoiding getting completely jammed up on the flanks because their defenders were quick to look for passes with some diagonality into their midfield.

Important note: We’ve been talking about Salzburg pressing in a 4-2-3-1 formation, but the formation itself isn’t essential. It happens to have been the formation Marsch chose for this match-up, but, as he’ll often say in interviews or coaching talks (and he does a lot of interviews and coaching talks), he’s employed a total of nine different formations in his brief tenure at Salzburg. So it’s not about the formation. It’s about the philosophy. Everything Marsch does, no matter the formation, is about dynamism, aggression, and initiative. 

That’s how his family did The Prado Museum of Madrid -- more than 7,000 paintings, arguably the best collection in all of Europe -- in under forty-five minutes.



Counter-pressing


If pressing is doing The Prado’s 7 through 10 rooms and seeing, briefly, Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest and The Surrender at Breda as a fast, responsive unit, then counter-pressing is when the middle child suddenly needs to use the restroom, the entire family uses the restroom.




The idea behind counter-pressing (and why it’s so important to the Marsch approach) is this: You’re most likely to score a goal in the immediate aftermath of winning possession, and the best time to win possession is in the immediate aftermath of losing it. It’s a core component of playing against the ball, and Marsch employs it as aggressively as anyone in the world.

Salzburg counter-pressed throughout the game. Whenever they’d lose the ball, the nearest player (actually, ideally, the two nearest players) would immediately attack it. Atlético did some things to mitigate its effectiveness, like maintaining field balance to prevent getting burned too badly on quick counterattacks, but counter-pressing (or at least the essence of counter-pressing) was at play in some of Salzburg’s better chances created. 




The key to remember with counter-pressing is it’s not just about getting the ball back -- it’s about getting the ball back in order to score a goal. That’s why it wasn’t enough for them all to simply follow and wait for the middle Marsch child to the restroom area. Every Marsch’s needed to actually use the restroom, so they wouldn’t have to stop again for a while.


Salzburg in possession


When you ask Marsh how he likes to play when his team has the ball, he pulls up just short of telling you he doesn’t give a shit. He’ll hit on something about playing direct, but he’s going to change the subject to playing “against-the-ball” as quickly as possible.

The thing was, though, Atlético doesn’t necessarily love having the ball either. They don’t hate it, but they don’t want to have it all the time, and so they ceded about half the game’s possession to Salzburg.

This was a possible concern for Marsch for three reasons. The first, already addressed, is that extended possession of the ball is just flat-out antithetical to his being for reasons beyond x's and o's. The second is that possessing the ball for longer durations decreases the total number of opportunities to counter-press.  None of this to is to say a team who has a lot of possession of the ball can’t also successfully counter-press (many very good teams do), it’s just that Salzburg is extremely against-the-ball focused and their work with the ball tends to be very direct. Which brings us to the third problem: Atlético likes, and is good at, forming a solid defensive block, sometimes even a quite low one, and those are difficult to break down playing direct.

Salzburg did do some good things in possession, though. Their goal at the beginning of the second half involved a surprising number of passes before they played a long diagonal and then cut the ball through the box. 




And also, there are, in fact, some strong parallels between playing with the ball for longer stretches than you prefer and navigating very big museums. Here’s a compilation of Salzburg in possession:





So it can go with the Spanish Masters


The truth is that despite Salzburg controlling the game in stretches, particularly in the second half, Atlético had reasonable success breaking down the Salzburg press. 




That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with Marsch’s approach. He believes in taking the game to the opponent no matter how big they are or how many paintings they have. And he doesn’t think the mindset of the team should be built on results. It should be built on growth, and that part of growing is understanding it’s okay to make mistakes.





That’s why Marsch didn’t yell at his family when they were back at their hostel on the outskirts of Madrid, and he realized they had walked straight past room 12. The room where they keep Las Meninas. Diego Velázquezes masterpiece. The museum’s crown jewel. 




Over dinner they sat as a family and talked about what had gone wrong. Not to dwell, but to learn. When you make mistakes in Europe, you pay for them, so he was disappointed, but he was proud of their performance. Then Marsch, his wife, and their three children formed a circle, wrapped arms around each other tightly, and resolved to next week give the Louvre absolute hell.







Sergino's El Clásico

Sergino Dest was very good in his first El Clásico. But why?


People do not understand Sergino Dest’s Instagram. They see him staring down the barrel of the camera doing barbell curls in his Ajax shirt, and they think its vanity. Now he’s in an all-green 1970s disco bowling uniform posing in front of a glass storefront that has green paint on it and also is reflecting green trees from across the street, and they think he’s “looking for attention”. Next people see he has four different posts of him just looking at his phone, and in one of those pictures he’s giving his phone a cool finger-point for a selfie he’s taking with it (thereby being in two different pictures at once), and they don’t know what to think at all.

But it’s actually very simple what to think: First, Sergino Dest is an artist, potentially a generational one. Second, the picture of him taking a picture of himself is likely an early attempt of his at merging the personal ego with the infinite. And, third, he fucking loves Instagram. 


Defending Vinícius Junior


There was an expectation that Vinícius Junior would torch Sergino Dest in Saturday’s El Clásico. I don't mean among the USMNT types. It’s simply not a way we’re inclined as a people to think, so that possibility could not have occurred to us. But most people with an interest in the game and some background knowledge of the match-up anticipated something ugly down Barcelona’s right flank. Dest had recently arrived at Barcelona from Ajax with a reputation as being a bad defender, while Vinícius had YouTube videos titled 50+ Players Destroyed by Vinícius Junior and Vinícius Junior Humiliating Everyone 2020.

But Vinícius did not torch Dest. In fact, by the time it was all over eleven different twitter accounts paid Dest’s performance the highest honor possible by sending out slight variations on this tweet:


Dest had pocketed Vinícius. 

He’d played him tight, often higher up the field. To whatever extent Barcelona had a coherent pressing scheme, it appeared to me that it involved a trigger to press whenever a Real Madrid received the ball with their back to goal. Dest was active with that early on. (By “appeared to me”, I mean they said explicitly that’s what was happening on the Managing Madrid podcast post-game report).

Defending Vinícius like this increased the risk of his getting into the space behind, but Dest did pretty well to almost never let this happen through a combination of thoughtful positioning, being fast, and a good measure of sheer determination. It might start as taking a preemptive step to stop Vinícius getting slipped in, then continue as a charging run as long as need be to prevent his successfully arriving and receiving in the box.

I say almost never because Dest wasn’t perfect -- a better weighted ball from a Vinícius teammate here, a better Vinícius finish there and the story of Dest's performance would have been different. That doesn’t matter, though. He pocketed Vinícius. And squinting at the screen you'd almost swear that standing out for Barcelona in his first El Clásico was something Dest appeared genuinely convinced he was supposed to be doing. 

Why?

Before we get into answering that, here's a video of Dest defending Vinícius:




Questions


Did Vinícius just have a bad day? Probably. He only attempted two dribbles.

Is Vinícius bad in general now? There have been rumblings his attempted dribbles are down this season (to two per game, incidentally), but, no, Vinícius is not bad now. Dest still deserves credit for containing him.

Does this mean Dest is not a bad defender? Maybe. He certainly didn’t seem like a bad defender to me anyway.

How sure are we that he was even a bad defender at Ajax? We’re not completely convinced he was a bad defender at Ajax.


A brief note on Dest’s defending at Ajax


The way I choose to see it is that while Dest wasn’t a bad defender at Ajax, it would not have been difficult for someone inclined to think that he was to find reasons to support their thinking. They could easily find examples of repeated mistakes. These examples would tend to relate to Dest’s not having fully learned to stay locked-in for ninety minutes. It’s not that he’d be wandering off into the stands, but maybe he’d glance for support at a bad time and an attacker would dribble half by him. Or he’d be caught flat-footed, arrive to challenge a beat late, and so then lose it. Or he’d misread the urgency of a situation, get muscled as a result, and his man would be off toward goal.

Or maybe up 3-0 against Heerenveen he wouldn’t get back with El Clásico level drive. You would not have seen below sequence happen this past Saturday. No, he’d have been busting back straight from the jump:




Now back to El Clásico / It was about more than Vinícius


Dest wasn’t defending Vinícius only -- that’s not how soccer works. He had to also contend with Karim Benzema, who Real Madrid sent in and out of the halfspace. Benzema would either be dropping back for the ball, or pushing up to pin Dest and Pique. Other times Benzema would go all the wide of Dest, with Vinícius in the halfspace or moving more central. And then there was Real Madrid’s left back, Ferland Mendy, who’d function as a wide winger all the way up whenever they had Barcelona back in their block. But occasionally, it would be Mendy moving into the half space, with Vinícius staying all the way wide. Or instead out wide it might be, again, Benzema. They’d all -- Vinícius, Benzema, Mendy -- be swirling around, and Dest had to rotate between them measuring risk, closing space, and providing cover. 

And he did it well. 

But why did he do it well?


It wasn't just about more than Vinícius; it was also about more than El Clásico  /  A theory of Dest's likely mystical experience 


I believe Dest performing above expectation in Saturday’s El Clásico can be explained in part by a concept popular in electoral politics: The Enthusiasm Gap. The idea is that when voters are polled in a particular electoral contest, they might be evenly divided in preference between one candidate and the other. But if, owing to dynamics of the race, one side is more enthusiastic about voting for their candidate than the other side is theirs, then the side with the more enthusiastic voters will win the election. That’s because their voters are more likely to turn out to vote on account of how enthusiastic they are.

So our very basic starting premise here is that Dest outperformed because he was more enthusiastic about what was happening on the field than his direct Real Madrid opponents, and our initial working hypothesis is that what accounts for this gap is it was Dest's El Clásico debut. I believe his performance supports this theory, but, and this is important, I say this only in part accounts for Dest's performance because it cannot possibly be the only force at play here, and this is for two reasons:
  1. If it was that El Clásico debut alone could explain an exceptional performance in an El Clásico debut, then over time we should have seen an unusually high percentage of El Clásico debutante’s being among the better performers on their team, which we have not.
  2. And, more importantly: Yes, Dest’s performance can be characterized as enthusiastic, but it cannot be characterized primarily as enthusiastic. It was an enthusiastic performance, of course, but the description is incomplete to the point of being useless. Enthusiasm was a force, but not the essential force. Clearly there was also something inspiring complete focus and overwhelming motivation beyond what is normal for Dest, and other debutantes. 
So it may seem that the case for the Enthusiasm Gap theory has fallen in on itself. But it hasn’t completely. It’s just that we need an elegant solution, so we return to the drawing board.

The solution needs to provide a cause for Dest’s enthusiasm advantage that is independent of, and supplementary to, this game having been an El Clásico. And this discovered cause must also be likely to have produced a state in Dest relating to locked-in-ness and perhaps primal motivation that is a different from, and greater in force than, that of mere enthusiasm. 

If these seem impossible conditions, then that’s probably because you hadn’t yet entertained the possibility that during this year’s El Clásico there was something that caused Dest, and I do mean Dest in particular, to enter a trance, flow, or mystical state. If you prefer, you can think of it as some kind of religious experience.

To finish connecting these dots first we need to think back to the above sections on Dest rotating defensively between Vinícius, Benzema, and Mendy. They move around him again and again: Vinícius, Benzema, and Mendy, and on and on. It looked, from our perspective, like this:



Next we need to think back to early 2019 when Dest was interviewed on the Scuffed Soccer Podcast. He talked about his development, his experiences coming through the Ajax academy, and his time with the United States youth national team:
“People in my team, in the US U-20, they were talking about Diego Lainez. And I was like Who’s that I don’t know him. And then they said he’s the best player of Mexico, and they showed me his Instagram, and he had a lot of followers, so I was like Oh damn. But I was not scared. I was like Ok, let him come.”
Now, suppose you are Dest, and try, if you can, to imagine the intensity of this experience:



Gio Reyna passes to Erling Haaland


Gio Reyna met Erling Haaland in January 2020 in Marbella, Spain. Reyna had just graduated to the Dortmund first team, and Haaland was the new signing from Salzburg. This was winter camp, and they would have both been nervous and expressed it in different ways.

We don’t know all they talked about at winter camp, but their first interaction probably would have been, at least in structure, a lot like a normal conversation -- exchanging basic background information in effort to find some common ground. Haaland is from a small town in southwest Norway called Bryne, so we can expect the initial exchange, in part, to have gone like this:


Or at least that’s the best video I can find approximating a Haaland introduction. In any case, Bryne and New York City are very different places, so they’d have moved on to something else. Possibly toward that their dads had both been professional soccer players. Haaland would have then asked Reyna if Claudio passed the ball, and next he’d have interrupted in a near shouting voice before Reyna could finish saying 'yes?' that that's exactly want he wanted son Reyna to do to him. Pass the ball to Erling. 


The five major types of Reyna-to-Haaland passes


I’ve completed a review of every pass Reyna has ever made to Haaland (for which there is publicly available footage) and determined it makes the most sense to organize them into five major pass types. Reasonable people can disagree on any number of things about how I've gone about organizing these passes, but my decision here, for the purposes of this article, is final. 


Pass Type #1: Did not pass the ball to Erling


This category is straight-forward enough, other than it being made of passes that were not to Haaland. It’s important to include them, though, as 1) it seems like they could have been played to Haaland and 2) Haaland is visibly annoyed they were not (or, in cases where he's not visible annoyed, we can otherwise reasonably assume he actually is annoyed, even though he didn't show it, given the game context).




Pass Type #2: When Erling's back is to goal


These passes do not happen terribly often because Haaland far prefers always to be sprinting headlong toward goal, but they do happen (only out of necessity) frequently enough to demand their own group.




Pass Type #3: Through-ball into a wide area


The less said about this type of pass the better. There were four or five of these but they're unpleasant to watch, so I’ve cut it down to one example that I think gives the idea well enough.




Pass Type #4: Cross


Reyna crosses to Haaland will generally come from inside, or just outside, the box and will tend to be played from closer to the end line than not.




Pass Type #5: Little Passes of Danger


These are the most common and most valuable of Reyna-to-Haaland passes. They are, as the name suggests, little passes that put Haaland in an immediately dangerous position to score a goal. They are likely the only passes that Haaland actually cares about. He prefers them most in transition and to his left foot, but he’s willing to except them in any situation so long as they allow him to smash the ball at the goal as quickly as possible.



Addendum


There have been, unfortunately, two Reyna-to-Haaland passes that I do not believe fit cleanly enough into any of the above five categories. We'll have to wait and see if more passes like these emerge over the coming months and years, at which point we could consider adding another Reyna-to-Haaland pass type. 

Horizontal type pass in transition 




Central Through-Ball of Moderate Length




We're not happy, Frank

Before we get into it, I want to be clear that I am willing to set aside what Frank said to Jesse. He probably just assumed, I believe fairly, going by appearance, that Jesse was a tourist who had wandered past security. Frank likely only meant to end the conversation as quickly as possible. It's behind us. 


We're not happy about the game against Sevilla


The Americans are not yet completely convinced Frank Lampard knows what he's doing. We are not suggesting there's something within the English character that will prevent him from one day becoming a high-level soccer coach. We only point out that from the outset, Sevilla seemed to have clearer sense of what was going on than Chelsea did. 

In the end, it wouldn't translate to better chances for Sevilla, at least not according to one site that posts Expected Goals, a metric invented by non-athletes to destroy the game. Chelsea came out ahead with 0.39 xG to Sevilla's 0.28. There was something in the rhythms of the game, though, that seemed off, damn the numbers.

Arguably the greatest affront in the entire game was that Frank again played Pulisic on the right wing. Pulisic, as has been well documented, and nearly universally agreed upon, is a left winger. His emergence from spring lockdown to ascend to "best attacker in London" status came from the left and cut in. Yes, there was certain degree of fluidity to it all, and Pulisic did, on occasion, arrive in the box with tact and venom from the right, but the man's a left winger. Everyone other than Frank agrees on this. 

What we're most anxious about, though, if we're willing to really dig into what it is we're feeling, is that the new signing Kai Havertz is getting this good thing we had going all jammed up. 

 
My esteemed colleague Sus (@_Susaeta) makes an excellent case that is proven out by these screenshots: 







End this silliness. 



But credit to Sevilla?


Sevilla has an approach well-formed by the now completely redeemed Julen Lopetegui. They used it to win the Europa League in August. Sevilla were always going to have an organizational upper-hand against a Chelsea side still figuring out how to incorporate nearly $1.5 billion worth of new players. 

We could know a lot about Sevilla's tactics by watching their games, but we don't need to do that thanks to an in-depth Sevilla breakdown on the tactics website that a group of Germans earnestly named Spielverlagerung. The article goes on at length in unsettling detail about how the team has functioned on the field under Lopetegui. An excerpt:

The primary defensive unit begin in a deeper start position than a conventional 4-3-3 used by the likes of Manchester City, this allows the opposition’s first pressing line to be drawn out, creating more space for Sevilla’s midfield and wingers to receive beyond the opposition’s midfield line and thus for Sevilla to break the first and even second line of the opposition’s press an increased proportion of the time. In specific focus upon the full-backs... both full-backs ensure that from a technical perspective they are in a position in order to break the opposition press, this is the first option to play out should it be available.

It did not appear that Chelsea were fully prepared for what the Germans made clear would be Sevilla's first option for advancing the ball through their pressure: fullbacks. In the first half, most of Sevilla's successful build-outs went through Marcos Acuña, a fullback, down the Pulisic/Reece James right flank. Often very easily:



I'm willing to allow this may have been partially Pulisic's fault, but only very reluctantly, and I'm adamant about primarily blaming Frank. And since it seems possible to swing it, Jorgihno. 


Did matters improve in the second half?


Well, to start with, yes, dramatically. This is because Pulisic was on the left wing, or at least centrally with a leftward tilt, which we're good with given that Kai Havertz wasn't obviously in the way.




Problem is, soon after that Pulisic started popping up on the right. It began to feel that Frank had only started him out on the left to punk us. 

That may be harsh. Really it went back and forth fluidly between sides and often the half spaces. Plus, Kai Havertz in general did seem to continue to be somewhat less of a nuisance. Then later Hakim Ziyech came in, and Pulisic was then even more solidly on the left. Does Ziyech being in the game always mean Pulisic will be on the left? If that's the case then we should obviously hope to see as much as possible of Ziyech in the future.

And in terms of defense, was the Chelsea press looking more like a 4-2-2-2 now? Was it working better because Pulisic (now in the second line of two) wasn't getting pinched too far in like in the first half? Because he didn't need to shield as much central space anymore? All of these questions are too difficult to answer, but to whatever extent things did or didn't improve in the second half it ended with Pulisic doing this dramatic spin-pass:



He stayed down, writhing in pain, grabbing his leg, and we were overcome with anger at Frank for keeping him in the game this long. Or we would have been if we hadn't, on good advise, already stopped watching the game more than an hour ago. 



Pulisic's leg is fine, by the way, and the game ended 0-0.





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