Frank Lampard is restoring the proper balance between “what” and “how” at Chelsea FC. After a year of stagnant dogmatism, the Blues are once more showing how creative pragmatism can be.
As my colleagues Kevin and Travis have ably explicated, Frank Lampard learned valuable lessons from all of his Chelsea managers, and some of them are already finding life in the Blues’ preseason. Among the many managers in global football to whom Lampard owes no debt of knowledge is Maurizio Sarri, who neither worked with Lampard nor endowed him with any institutional knowledge via the current squad.
Throughout this summer Chelsea have regularly built play out from the back to start their attack. Contra people who learned football via EDM-laced YouTube clips or EA Sports, this is not a particularly difficult way to execute one aspect of the game. Once again, the Perry variant on Williamson’s First Law: everything is complicated when you don’t know a f**king thing about it.
Particularly given four of their five opponents this preseason, playing out from the back is as much a function of the quality gap as any sort of tactical instruction or technical know-how from the players. Many Premier League teams, undoubtedly those in the top six, could and would have played out from the back in those situations.
The Blues are not doing anything new, and they are certainly not doing anything that required 64 games to achieve the first (of indeterminate quantity) level of mastery. Moreover, how the Blues played under Maurizio Sarri is minimally transferable to any other style. Everything we saw last year exists only within the rote context of those circuits. As just about every team from Everton onward showed, you only need to remove one piece and the whole machine grinds itself off the tracks.
If anything, the regularity of playing out from the back is a bit of a jaunt into fantasy land. Against Premier League and Champions League opposition, playing out from the back may often be the wrong choice, as it was for Barcelona against the Blues in Japan.
But somewhere along the way, playing out from the back become the gold standard end-in-itself for football teams.
Maybe it’s because Pep Guardiola does it (except for all those times when he doesn’t, cf. tactical fouls), maybe because it was a gratuitous feature of Maurizio Sarri’s style or maybe simply because the stereotype of English teams has them all playing Route One football and, among pseudo-intellectuals, anything not traditionally English is always the preferred option. In a choice between stereotyped styles, the keyboard sophisticates insist upon the superiority of end-to-end circuits in a 4-3-3 with r*****a over a long ball.
But you, loyal reader, know that Chesterton’s fence runs through Premier League midfields, and sometimes you just have to put the ball over it.
In all competitions this season, many times the Blues will find the most effective way to move the ball from their goalkeeper or defenders into the opponent’s half will be with one long kick.
Contra the same people from above, this is not the lazy primate’s way of playing the ball.
The downfield players need to read the flight of the ball, see how the opposition is lining up for the second ball, look for an opportunity to knock the ball out of the air into space and several other considerations.
But even more than that, they have to be motivated to win the battles for the second ball. They need a player to go up for an aerial duel, and not just make a pro forma jump but win positive contact with the ball. Then they need other players to sprint into a ground or aerial challenge for the second ball, at which point they can look to unleash a player into space, but they may need to win back the ball first.
Uh oh. Did I say they have to be motivated to do all that? Damn. I have on good authority that this Chelsea squad is very difficult to motivate. Or maybe it was just that selfish Eden Hazard who turned the good apples bad.
Playing the ball long over the top of the opponents press and midfielders may not be pretty for viewers or pleasant for the players, but it works and it can win games. Most of all, it needs to be coached, not with X’s and O’s on a whiteboard but with motivating man-management. Frank Lampard will give this tool its proper attention because he knows that what matters most is what happens in the final third, not how you get there.
As long as the team makes the right decision for the moment, Lampard will be satisfied with their play. Any other priority reduces football to performance art.