Zonal Marking. Michael Cox. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Michael Cox
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008291150
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words. Cruyff deployed him in midfield during training matches, desperate to improve his confidence in possession.

      Cruyff invested huge faith in Busquets. He was relatively short for a goalkeeper, at 1.81 metres, but was incredibly confident in possession and loved playing chipped passes over opposition attackers to his teammates. For most observers’ tastes, however, he was still incredibly haphazard. Shortly after replacing Zubizarreta as number 1, he made a characteristic error for the decisive goal in a shock 2–1 defeat at Gothenburg, charging off his line to intercept a long ball. Approaching the edge of his box, and unsure whether to head or punch, he did neither and Jesper Blomqvist, a winger hardly renowned for his aerial prowess, headed into the empty goal. This was typical of Busquets’ style, and the type of mistake the great Zubizarreta would never have made. More significantly, Busquets’ footballing skills were far from flawless and he was caught in possession rather too often. Even his attire prompted nerves, as he insisted on wearing long tracksuit bottoms, and when combined with the muddy goalmouths of this era, meant he looked too scruffy to inspire much confidence.

      Journalists constantly linked Cruyff with a move for Van der Sar, to which Cruyff would diplomatically respond by pointing out that he didn’t have any slots left for foreign players. Besides, he forgave errors from footballing goalkeepers, believing that subtler positive contributions from sweeping and distributing compensated for the odd cheap concession. This became the mantra at Barcelona, and Busquets’ approach was considered so important that he later became the club’s goalkeeping coach, mentoring the likes of Pepe Reina and Víctor Valdés, and ensuring that Cruyff’s vision of a footballing goalkeeper remained integral to the Barcelona way.

      This had been a crucial feature of Total Football in the 1970s: defenders bursting forward when opportunities arose, with midfielders and attackers providing cover by dropping back. To make this worthwhile, however, the Ajax and Holland sides of the 1970s required defenders to be genuinely good footballers, capable of using their freedom to provide decisive contributions in the final third. Because of the importance of pressing, meanwhile, they also needed to offer speed, to play in a high defensive line and cover the space in behind.

      Krol played left-back during Holland’s run to the 1974 World Cup Final, and his three defensive colleagues were also particularly attack-minded. Right-back Wim Suurbier, also of Ajax, was renowned more for his speed and stamina than his defensive ability, and constantly charged up the wing. In the middle, Holland converted Feyenoord’s Wim Rijsbergen from a right-back into a centre-back, and most significantly redeployed Ajax’s Arie Haan, a reliable midfielder, as the side’s fourth defender, although he had never previously played in defence. It’s also telling that the only two significant foreigners who turned out for Ajax during this period, Yugoslavian Velibor Vasović and German Horst Blankenburg, both played the physical, old-school hardman role, because Ajax simply didn’t produce that kind of defender themselves. ‘The foreign players brought something different,’ Cruyff acknowledged of the 1970s Ajax side. That kind of statement in England or Italy would be about foreigners bringing flair, but in the Netherlands it was about foreigners bringing fight.

      By the time Cruyff’s and Van Gaal’s sides were dominating Europe in the 1990s, both were determined to promote the concept of the ball-playing defender, helped by the back-pass reform. Cruyff continued to talk about the importance of attacking the halfway line rather than defending the goal even after his retirement, complaining about ‘defenders running back towards their own goal when they lose the ball, rather than moving forward to put pressure on the players in possession’. His Barcelona side, more than any other team of the 1990s, attempted to play in the opposition half.