///Inter Milano a realizat o premiera: sunt primul club care castiga Liga Campionilor avand posesie sub 35% in fiecare din ultimele 3 meciuri jucate.
Will Inter's successful performance at Barcelona, when they had 16% possession, be seen as a turning point in football?
One of the beauties of football is its capacity for reinvention, without great rewriting of the rules. Football seems to have (historically justified) faith that coaches and players will be able to mediate their own way away from predictability or, worse, unwatchability. Yes, there has been tinkering with the offside rule, and the backpass and the tackle from behind have been outlawed, but essentially a player from a century ago could be parachuted into a game today and would need no more than a two-minute tutorial to get him up to speed on the modern rules.
When a rigid W-M seemed dominant, fluid 4-2-4 rose up to overcome it. As catenaccio threatened to strangle the game, along came Total Football. As Johan Cruyff was accusing 3-5-2 as being "the death of football" because it killed the winger, single-striker systems emerged to reintroduce them. Football constantly evolves, and watching Internazionale frustrate Barcelona two weeks ago, it was hard not to wonder whether tactical historians of the future will look back on that game as a turning point as significant as, say, Hungary's 6-3 win over England in 1953, Celtic's 2-1 win over Inter in the 1967 European Cup final or Italy's 3-2 victory over Brazil at the 1982 World Cup.
It rather depends, of course, on what happens next as to whether this is confirmation of a trend or a blip, but what Inter's victory has done is to challenge the assumption that the "best" way to play is to maintain possession and pass a side to death – as Barça have, as Spain do and as, in a slightly less aesthetically pleasing way, Brazil do.
Now, some caveats. Inter still lost at Camp Nou, and but for a handball decision against Yaya Touré that could have gone either way, would have gone out on the away goals rule. Although they were themselves wronged in losing Thiago Motta to a red card (the continuing unwillingness of the authorities retroactively to punish those, like Sergio Busquets, who have blatantly cheated is bewildering), they also had the benefit of two key decisions in the first leg, in that Diego Milito's goal was offside and Dani Alves should have had a penalty (although it's hard to have sympathy with somebody who cries wolf so often). And, of course, Barça were disadvantaged in having had to make the journey to Milan by bus, which perhaps left them leggy and not quite so sharp in their pressing as they had been, for instance, at the Emirates.
So their 3-1 lead was fortuitously obtained, and without it, Inter would not have had the platform on which to build their rearguard action, and even then it might have meant nothing had Bojan's late strike been allowed to stand. And yet, for all that, to make Barcelona look so toothless when they had 84% – 84%! - of possession is remarkable, and shows what can be achieved with rigorous organisation allied to immense mental strength.
José Mourinho's claim that his side deliberately gave the ball away so as not to lose focus may have been exaggeration for the sake of bravado but, whether purposeful or not, to prosper having had so little of the ball seems almost the definition of anti-football. (Earlier this season, a frustrated Arsène Wenger asked how his side were supposed to play properly when other teams persisted in playing anti-football against him, and raised the thought of the former Estudiantes coach Osvaldo Zubeldía, an evangelist for "anti-fútbol", storming into a press conference in La Plata demanding to know how his side were supposed to spoil and break the game up when the opposition persisted in playing "fútbol" against them, passing and dribbling, having shots and generally disrupting his team's game plan.) At the very least, Inter's success must make football ask whether possession is really all that important.
[Discutie despre latura stiintifica a posesiei cu cifre, sarita]
General Application:
Perhaps, though, this was a special case. Inter proved themselves a team with great tactical discipline – as they had in holding Fiorentina when down to nine men earlier in the season – and they were playing a side who pose a special set of problems in a game in which they knew narrow defeat would be enough.
Opta statistics, produced in conjunction with Castrol, show that over the past two seasons in the Premier League in only around a third of games did one side have 60% of possession or more, and when they did they won 52% of the time, and lost 25%. If a side had 70% possession or over (which happened in 4.7% of games), they won 67% of the time and lost 17%. Only once in the past two seasons did one side have over 80 per cent possession – Liverpool, in their 3-2 win at Bolton last August.
In the closer games, having 50-59.9% possession meant a side won 43% of the time and lost 31%. So there is a clear correlation between dominating possession and winning matches. Intuitively, we know that there are sides who are successful at counter-attacking, which logically means accepting a lower percentage of possession.
What Inter showed last week, is that there are specific cases in which a radical disregard for possession can succeed. At Milan, Arrigo Sacchi got fed up of players moaning about his obsession with team shape, and so proved its worth with a simple drill. "I convinced [Ruud] Gullit and [Marco] Van Basten by telling them that five organised players would beat 10 disorganised ones," he said. "And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, [Mauro] Tassotti, [Paolo] Maldini, [Alesandro] Costacurta and [Franco] Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, [Frank] Rijkaard, [Pietro Paolo] Virdis, [Alberigo] Evani, [Carlo] Ancelotti, [Angelo] Colombo, [Roberto] Donadoni, [Christian] Lantignotti and [Graziano] Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once."
There are times when possession matters less than organisation.
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