Interpreting Sacchi

Every World Cup I’m reminded of the differences in the way various cultures hand down the game of soccer from one generation to the next. Cruising around some of the other ‘country’ pages on this site got me to thinking about it again and then I stumbled onto this jewel of a comment by Arrigo Sacchi.

“In Italy we play soccer in a very conservative way: totally in the back. For two reasons: a social one (this is what Italians prefer) and a sports one. We lack the culture of working hard and when you don’t work hard it’s easier to play in defense rather than attack.” (The quote is from the book Soccer: Modern Tactics by Alessandro Zauli). The ‘hard work’ quip, well, I’m not touching that bit of oversimplification. And this notion of Italians being conservative ergo their soccer is conservative is not completely unique, but I think what Sacchi is saying is this: you can’t really attack unless you abandon the fear of losing. And by attack, he’s not saying ‘punt the ball 40 yards downfield to a target man’ but attack the ball on both sides of the field, get numbers forward when you have a chance, etc. Put yourself in a position to win by getting more bodies to the ball in an organized fashion.

You can’t do that without exposing parts of the pitch at some point, which is wear the fear lives. So rather than deal with that fear or play an ‘open game’ and risk getting bombarded by the media on Monday, it just became more acceptable (in broad terms) to take some of the fizz out of the game, to wait patiently for an opposition mistake, to play the counter-attack. As opposed to, say, Barcelona, where its better to lose and win beautifully than to play ugly and get results. Just ask Louis Van Gaal. Hah. Anyway, at the end of the day, the results speak for themselves—the Azzurri certainly don’t have to apologize to anybody. And from a pure stylistic standpoint, I am eager to see them match up against an African side and a CONCACAF team in the first round.