Too much 'CONTROL'?

 

Alex Moneypenny - an Arsenal uber-fan who runs a Youtube channel on his obsession called The Different Knock (although it's pretty much exclusively Arsenal-focused, I find a lot of his observations - like this one - have wider applicability) - recently posted this video about a possible weakness in Mikel Arteta's (and many other modern football managers') general approach to the game. [The pertinent part of the discussion begins at around 10.14.]

He suggests that an excessive desire to assert 'control' in a game, and thereby to reduce as far as possible all elements of risk and unpredictability, may be misguided, counter-productive. It is unrealistic, impossible to expect to be able to eliminate risk altogether: so many games turn on a single against-the-run-of-play goal,... or a single terrible decision from the referee. But the single-minded pursuit of this unattainable ideal often comes at the cost of making your own game extremely conservative - perhaps more predictable, and certainly less exciting: if you take fewer risks, you create fewer chances for yourself. And if you have fewer chances to score in a game, you are perhaps putting yourself at a greater, not lesser, risk of losing a game to a single, untypical action, or a mere stroke of luck from your opponents.

Alex points out that drawing analogies from other sports about the value of focusing on fine margins may be misleading for football. Most sports are far more high-scoring than football, and thus the number of such 'margins' in a game that might swing the outcome will be much larger. In basketball or baseball or tennis there are dozens or even hundreds of individual actions in every game that may have a decisive influence on the final result; in a game of football, there are often only a handful - sometimes just one.

It has long been my own view that it is more important in football to play an effective attacking game yourself than to try to prevent your opponent from playing at all, it is better to create a lot of scoring chances for yourself than to attempt to limit the opponent's opportunities to zero. As Alex says here, "When you try to stifle the opponent, sometimes you stifle yourself."

Also, of course, it makes for better entertainment. While fans of successful but mostly unadventurous football teams can usually force a smile through a string of arid 1-0 wins, we know in our hearts that they - like the rest of us - would really far prefer to be witnessing a 3-2 or 5-3 thrillfest most weeks....