the Spain-Switerland first round game has just finished, with Switzerland stunning tournament favorites Spain 1-0, even though Spain had something like 77% of ball posession. While it’s nice to see the underdogs/little guys win, my friend Alex has a point: Does it mean boring, defensive-minded football is winning out over the beautiful, flowing game as played by teams such as Brazil or Spain (or the Netherlands if you include “total football” in the definition of “beautiful”)?
Good question. What the defensive-minded (let’s call them “turtle teams”) do is reduce a game of 100+ meters to centimeters, by putting lots of players between the 5 and 20 yard mark. Now the flowing, attacking teams have to win a battle of centimeters and make it through a wall of players. A hot goaltender (like the Swiss keeper today) makes it even harder for attacking teams.
Certainly soccer/football is more enjoyable to watch with the flowing/attacking teams, but the world cup national teams now face a soccer form of “asymmetrical warfare”: There’s no way most countries can compete with the development system or huge salaries of leagues and players on the big national sides such as Brazil or Spain, so they mark tight , defend like hell and hope for an opportunistic counter-attack or two (our team, the USA, does this too, although we have a few decent offensive-minded players). Even a top team like Italy is notorious for scoring an early goal and going into a maddening, boring, defensive shell for huge swaths of a game.
I don’t know what the right answer is here. There’s a yin-yang aspect to team sports, and a really good team should be able to crack open the defense of a turtle team, like Brazil did in their opener versus North Korea. It’s just harder to do. We’ll have to trust that good teams can evolve to counter the defensive shell strategy of turtle teams. That should be watchable in itself.
I don't know what the answer is either but I really hate those horns.
Rugby Union suffers from a similar problem; there are teams that just play for penalties (yes, England, I'm talking about you) and then there are teams that are better at playing a 'running game' (like the All Blacks, and sometimes the Wallabies..). The running game is far more beautiful to watch.
Posted by: Trish | June 16, 2010 at 04:43 PM
Hey Trish!
Yes the vuvuzela is absurdly annoying. Supposedly it is a SA tradition, but:
1. So was "necklacing" i.e. throwing a burning tire around someone's neck... should we allow that in the stadiums as well?
2. It's not really a tradition; it goes back to some 90's football matches.
3. You can't hear fans sing etc. which is the WHOLE POINT of having a large fan contingent at a match.
Posted by: misha | June 16, 2010 at 05:06 PM