- Nov 15, 2010
- 1,378
- 1,894
Agree. And (of course), any sort of pressing game is the other side of the coin from a possession game. They might or might not go with each other. Spotting when to press is key - the old coaching terminology of phases of play - it's when players are about to receive the ball or be challenged for it, or have just received the ball or have just won the ball that they are most vulnerable to losing possession. Our press is much more intense when it happens even when compared with last season, let alone earlier seasons, but much more selectively applied. And it's not as high, or so it seems to me from watching on tv. I like the way our forward players swarm. It's almost like a 5-5 formation sometimes when we're not in possession, with the front 5 just swarming wherever they need to, leaving the other 5 only loosely connected to them.We play what I would call a selective high press rather than an all out agressive high press. Pochettino still likes to play a possession based game but it's a world apart from the turgid nonsense we played under AVB.
I'd love to see some more stats on our possession though. Are we winning the ball back so very quickly that we can afford to lose it more often than we'd like to? Or are our possession stats more the result of conserving possession? I think it's a mix of both with the dynamic slowly changing towards the former. We seem to give the ball away a lot yet within no time we have it back again.
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