FCBarca
Mes que un Rag
Some good observations but who wants to mirror the old Serie A sort of play any longer? Is that really going to thrill the fanbase? Technical football, it's the era we live in and England has some catching up to do, stillTrue. Linguistics can be misleading indeed. My point is that English clubs play with less game management and general tactical thoughtfulness than their counter part in the continent. The crowd urges them as it is ingrained in the culture to go for it and play the end to end game we crave so much. This leads to English clubs severely undercooked when it comes to how much they practice the skills required to control a game, recycle possession, manage their effort and so on. Add to that the physical toll of the PL and you get clubs that ask too much from their players physically as well as lack of practice of tactical coaching practices. When English clubs were at their best in the mid '00s, it was mainly thanks to power and strong defensive organisation and not because we actually outplayed our opponents. Our best team of the decade only beat Barcelona's worst through stopping them rather than dominating them.
The problem however now is that clubs are stuck between two minds. Barcelona and Bayern raised the standards and it is no longer enough to win. You are actually required to dominate, be authoritative and be in control of games whether that's through possession (Barcelona) or dynamism and speed (Bayern) does not matter. English clubs are trying to adopt this pro active approach but failing due to the points mentioned earlier. The way I see it in my opinion is we can accept our limitations and go Italian style, go back to strong defensive partnerships and play to stop the continental teams, problem with that is that you need game changers in attack and we don't seem to be able to attract those. Either that or we can keep trying to reach that tactical level, in our case Van Gaal is as good as anyone to do that for us but whereas that would succeed or not is an entirely different question. The nature of the league, competence of Van Gaal, willingness of players and patience of board and fans are all factors that would have a say in answering that question.