Jonathan Wilson Front two back in vogue
For years it seemed that the strike-partnership was dead. Nobody played two up front any more, and there were increasingly few instances where it was impossible to think of one player without immediately imagining his partner: Keegan-Toshack, Rush-Dalglish, Cole-Yorke...
But while many teams these days prefer to play with a lone front man, there has been some attempts of late to find a second figure to add to the point of the attack. And, increasingly, that player is one who is normally employed out wide rather than through the centre.
Strike pairings were always a very British way of looking at the game; due, perhaps, to a distrust of midfield playmakers. In a country that for 30 years saw 4-4-2 as the one true way to play it’s understandable that the forward unit should become boxed off from the rest.
But over the past 20 years the perception of a team being made up of just three outfield units has broken down to the point where a number of coaches profess to being frustrated by the use of simple designations of formation. They prefer to see each player as having a specific role within a greater whole.
For teams that like to press, and whose effectiveness relies on every player functioning as a single entity, that is reasonable enough – even if it is handy to use the old, slightly clunky designations of 4-2-3-1 or 3-4-2-1 to help conceptualise the basic distribution of players on the pitch.
Whatever the coach’s preferred terminology, the tendency over the past couple of decades, with the occasional exception, has been for lone strikers to become universal players and not just scorers. Some are a combination of goalscorer and creator (David Villa, Sergio Aguero, Lionel Messi), others scorer and target man (Didier Drogba, Diego Costa, latter-day Cristiano Ronaldo) and some a combination of the two (Thierry Henry, early Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Andriy Shevchenko).
That, in turn, has changed how central defenders operate – in a back four, at least.
In the 1980s it was normal for the two central defenders to pick up a centre-forward each. Cover, if required, would come from a full-back tucking in because they rarely had wingers playing high up against them. With a lone centre-forward to handle, one central defender now does the marking, while the other sweeps up behind. That, in turn, liberates the full-backs to push forward, which is very much the modern way.
What this means, however, is that a lot of central defenders – although they have become more comfortable playing the ball out from the back – have lost the basic skills of defending. They are not used to having to mark tightly in open play or winning aerial battles, and this is a situation that is exacerbated for the elite clubs by the increasing economic gulf between themselves and the rest. The more the top clubs dominate possession, the less actual defending their defenders have to do.
And that means a side playing with two central strikers will be making one central defender operate outside their comfort zone and probably restrict the attacking movement of at least one of the full-backs.
In certain circumstances, because of the way the game has evolved, there can be an advantage to playing two forwards. But that leaves two questions for any coach minded to do so. Firstly, how can a second striker be found without leaving a shortfall elsewhere? And, secondly, which players these days can function as a second striker?
The answer to the first question appears to be that, unless you do what Liverpool have done with Mohammed Salah, and have a wide player drift inside in a 4-3-3 so that he effectively
It was impossible to think of one player without immediately imagining his partner: Keegan-Toshack, Rush-Dalglish, Cole-Yorke
functions as a second striker, it’s best done by using a back three. That’s what Pep Guardiola has done at Manchester City when he wants to get both Gabriel Jesus and Aguero into the side, and what one of his great influences, Louis Van Gaal, did while in charge of Holland.
Deciding that his defenders struggled in individual battles, Van Gaal accepted the need to switch to a back three before the 2014 World Cup, explaining: “I believe in this system also because the covering over the pitch is fantastic. You have always triangles... always occupation of the width.
“I wanted [Robin] Van Persie, [Arjen] Robben and [Wesley] Sneijder as my creators. Then I changed because I found at the training sessions that they were not strong enough, not connecting well with each other.”
His solution was to shift Nigel De Jong to a position in front of the back three and to pull Sneijder deeper rather than using him as a number 10.
“I thought I needed him to put Van Persie and Robben free on the goalkeeper,” added Van Gaal. “But they were good enough to do it because they liked the freedom I gave them.”
Since then, England and Tottenham Hotspur have taken to playing a back three, with Harry Kane alongside another central forward. And in both cases the player chosen has, like Robben, been a rapid forward more used to playing wide: Raheem Sterling and Lucas Moura.
Perhaps the idea is that players used to attacking the space between centreback and full-back from out to in can do the same from in to out. More likely though, it’s simply a matter of pace.
After all, a team playing with two central forwards is unlikely to offer much in the way of attacking width and so an ability to run in behind the opposing rearguard becomes vital.