In March 2019, Manchester United went to Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16 of the Champions League trailing 2-0 from the first leg. By half-time, they led 2-1. Needing another goal to go through on away goals, their manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, pulled a counterintuitive masterstroke: he sat back. For half an hour, almost nothing happened. PSG pushed tentatively, first baffled and then anxious. And then Solskjær unleashed his assault on panicking opponents, United won a penalty – a silly, modern, European handball, but a penalty nonetheless – and went through.
That was Solskjær at his zenith, the result that prompted Gary Neville to ask where he wanted his statue. Solskjær’s record at that point read P17 W14 D2 L1; he was still soaring on the euphoria of not being José Mourinho. His struggles to implement attacking structures had not yet been exposed. But where he had proved himself adept was in reading and manipulating the emotional flow of a game.
It’s a high-risk strategy, of course. Had PSG held on, everybody would have asked why Solskjær had held back, why he had essentially reduced the second half to a 15-minute game. But it worked because Solskjær understood that PSG were scarred by failure and prone to collapsing under pressure, while his United side, at that point, had utter faith in him as a conduit of the comeback spirit of 1999.
They would wait and go when he told them, and do so with a greater ferocity and belief in that final quarter-hour than they could have managed over the full 45 minutes, when each thwarted attack might have dented self-confidence, when a successful counter might have doubled their task.
Riding the emotions of a match is an attribute that has gone out of fashion. For years English football was obsessed by heart and passion and tended to be sceptical about systems and tactics. Now it feels there has been an overcorrection. There is an obsession with process.
Data is providing fascinating insights into the game, allowing the honing of structures of pressing and increasing efficiencies all over the pitch, but there is a danger that the humanity of players is lost, the fact that they have emotions, ups and downs – and that, crucially, these are not inevitable.
It may be that the statistics show a striker has always been inconsistent but suggest that the player will in time pull round and convert one in 10 chances over the course of his career. But in a slump should the manager just wait for a reversion to the mean? Or try to address what’s wrong and put an arm around a shoulder/dish out a bollocking/suggest a technical or tactical tweak and maybe try to improve that ratio to one in nine?
The idea that confidence and application are preset and immutable, perhaps even illusory, is one of the great lies of football’s statistical revolution. Data is not predestination. But it’s not just about individual players; as Solskjær showed in Paris, matches too have their moods that can be harnessed. Players can find new levels when the wind is with them; even the very best can crumble under pressure.
Take, say, Brighton’s recent 4-2 win over Tottenham or Liverpool’s 2-0 defeat of Burnley. In both, the team that went on to win were utterly dominant, should have been further ahead, and then became unexpectedly nervous as the apparently beaten opponent showed signs of resistance. In neither case was it enough, but it was for Crystal Palace when they came back from 2-0 down to draw at Manchester City, the equaliser the result of a panicked hack by Phil Foden.
There are few absolutes in football; almost everything is contingent. Philosophies are important as guiding principles, but are never “right” in itself; football is not a problem waiting to be solved. What may be appropriate in one situation is not necessarily so in another.
Aston Villa have thrived with their high offside line this season but at Old Trafford it cost them. They have looked weary since the second half of the Arsenal game: 2-0 up at Manchester United, in the face of a storm, they were no longer able to press with the intensity required to prevent opponents measuring passes into the space behind the back four. And perhaps that was not just a physical issue: would it be a surprise if players exhausted by the Christmas programme struggled to apply the detailed positional instructions, or to take the complex tactical decisions, that have become so integral to the modern game?
“It’s not to do with coaching any more,” Jürgen Klopp said before Liverpool’s 4-2 win over Newcastle. “It’s just recovery and then meetings, that’s how it is.” That perhaps explains the raggedness and energy, the relentlessness yet also the lack of precision, of Liverpool’s games from the goalless draw against Manchester United onwards (although it may just be a feature of repeatedly fielding Darwin Núñez).
To an extent that is the joy of Christmas football. Because of the lack of time available for preparation, there is a lack of control, a rawness to it, so that even players as composed as Rodri end up making basic mistakes (the flipside is the increased risk of injury and, if such things bother you, a lack of perceived “quality”).
It seems to have cost an increasingly exhausted-looking Arsenal, whose dependence on Gabriel Martinelli and, especially, Bukayo Saka has been exposed. It’s an oddity of Mikel Arteta’s time as Arsenal manager that every season they have suffered a miserable run of four or five games beginning in either December or January. Arteta famously once drew a heart and a brain holding hands as part of a team-talk but the sense is that the head, the process, has been over-prioritised.
The ideal is for the two to work in harmony, for managers to adjust the processes represented by the brain to accord with the psychological and physical state represented by the heart. Klopp, in acknowledging how little coaching is possible at this time of year, has prospered. Others have not. Even the best processes are contingent.
