English coaching is the vanilla of world football. It is based on playing the percentages
identifiable teams: they play positive, attacking football based on possession, dominating the opposition with the ball and playing deep in their half.
When they do not have the ball, they press high up the pitch. When they do have it, they are brave enough to play out from the back and through the opposition, what is termed ‘press resistance’, which takes some cojones, as Watford striker Troy Deeney would undoubtedly say.
Both sides play in blue and they have a blueprint for dominance. It is – through all its intricate, well-drilled working parts – fundamentally and ideologically positive and identifiable. It is also entertaining.
Guardiola balked at the term tiki-taka when he was Barcelona coach, saying it was pointless when it became passing for passing’s sake, but he does deserve to be associated with an ideology. His team do not have to play in City’s shirts to know that they are the product of Guardiola’s work. Likewise Sarri, who even has terms such as ‘Sarri-ball’ and #Sarrifootball attached to him. Just Google him and his team to witness an incredible showreel of the brave football he demands. City may not win the Premier League or Champions League; Napoli may not win their competitions. But both coaches have a vision, which takes me to a comment made by Mauricio Pochettino, the Tottenham Hotspur manager, ahead of his team’s league match at home to Bournemouth when discussing why he was so keen to promote young English talent in his team. “The English players are so talented,” Pochettino said, arguing that there was as much talent in England as in Brazil or Spain or his native Argentina. Then came the killer line: “It’s only about your vision and how you perceive them and then how you provide them with the platform and the tools to play and to perform.” Guardiola and Sarri are visionaries. So is Pochettino, to a certain extent, and his mentor, Marcelo Bielsa, emphatically is. There is a vision, also, in what Jose Mourinho and Rafael Benitez brought a decade ago when their essentially defensive football was the dominant approach. But where is the English visionary? When was there an identifiable and positive style and an approach that could help revolutionise English football and take it forward?
“It’s only about your vision,” Pochettino said and it is hard to recall the last time any English coach was called visionary. Instead, the word conjures up names from decades ago, such as Malcolm Allison, Brian Clough and Don Howe. Terry Venables, also – and we know how that ended with England and the suspicion around him. More recently there was Glenn Hoddle but it is 11 years since he managed, at Wolverhampton Wanderers, and by then his time had passed. It is hard to remember an English coach since who has been described as years ahead of his time or revolutionary or who has come up with an idea, as Allison did in his pomp, to urge Fifa to ban the back-pass to the goalkeeper because it had become a prop for lazy defending and negative football. The rule-change was implemented more than 20 years after Allison first thought of it.
Since then, English football has been associated with a coaching approach lacking imagination, creativity and based on playing the percentages. It has permeated every level of the game.
The vanilla of world football, it goes to the heart of the game in this country – to how we perceive ourselves and what we are comfortable with: from youth football to the national team. We play safe. The most prominent English coaches in recent years – Sam Allardyce, Roy Hodgson – are percentage coaches.
It will not change. Not at its very base, whatever the intentions of the Football Association, because its approach is also fundamentally riskadverse. What it needs is someone radical and revolutionary and outside of the establishment to break a template of mediocrity.
It is chilling that there are Argentines, Chileans, Spaniards, Germans, Italians, Portuguese who have a vision. But in England there is no one so, instead, we beat ourselves up saying our players are not good enough – when others do not share that view – and marvel at what foreign coaches can bring rather than ask ourselves ‘why are we not doing it?’.