Flightless

July 16th, 2011 | by: papai | Comments Off

Football tactics is a matter of making choices. The very fact that you only have effectively 10 players to shuffle around means strengthening one area creates spaces in others. Long has the tacticians of Calcio obsessed over creating the most perfectly balanced sides, and one of their biggest quests has been to find the answer to question – Trequartista or Wingers? Unfortunately, with the evolution of football, the latter species seem to be dying out in modern Calcio.

However, it was not always thus. The classic Italian sides of the 30s, the il Grande Inter of Herrara, the all conquering Juventus sides of Trappatoni all had free roaming number 10s and Wingers. The old WM tactical systems and later on, Catenaccio, relied on both. So what changed?

One of the biggest reasons for the decline of wingers has been changes to the offside rule over the years, which has now made the “Sweeper” obsolete. The Sweeper was one of the most highly specialized and most important positions in an italian tactical set-up. Taking out that component meant that another component needed to be shifted from somewhere to strengthen the defense. This led to various modifications in the basic 4-man midfield, the most pre-eminent among them being the rise in prominence of the “Mezzala” position. A mezzala can be perhaps best translated as “a central midfielder in wide position” – who will drift more to the middle to ensure midfield dominance than bomb forward hugging the touchlines. For the most recent example of a mezzala, see Marchisio in last season’s Juventus.

However, having a mezzala in the team creates all sorts of subsidiary problems. A mezzala is usually deployed along with a pure winger, thus making the formation lopsided. What happens then? The lone winger is double marked, the trequartista has no one to pass to and the Prima Punta is starved of service. Thus, further tactical innovations are needed – which gives rise to three pre-eminent modern systems.

1. 4-3-1-2: We ditch the concept of wingers altogether, and rely solely on the creativity of the trequartista in the attack. The central midfield on the other hand, has now been bolstered with three midfielders. A variation is the 4-3-2-1, which has two playmakers and one Prima Punta.

2. 4-2-2-2: We ditch the trequartista, and rely on lightning counter attacking football based on wingers high up the pitch. In this system, the central midfielders sit deep, and concede space in central midfield in order to capitalize on the speed of the counter attack.

3. 4-2-3-1: We keep both wingers and trequartista, but remove a striker from the equation. This is perhaps the most widely used formation in the world today, as the characteristics of the entire team can change based on the position of the band of 3. This flexibility is the main strength of the formation – indeed it is possible to replace the middle of the three with a CAM instead of a pure trequartista.

So, let us take a look at Serie A. The majority of the teams use the 4-3-1-2 as their default formation. Perhaps this is a testament to the cautious nature of Serie A coaching, where “not losing” is maybe valued more than “winning.” In a less cynical way, perhaps this is a testament to all the wonderful trequartistas that has graced, and continue to flourish in the peninsula. The direct effect of this situation has been the steady decline in the quality of Italian wingers.

With the abandonment of wingers, Italian coaches started pondering about the problem of width. The solution was obviously overlapping fullbacks. Thus, many players, who started out as widemen, slowly started morphing into wingbacks and then, fullbacks. The most famous example of this is none other that Zambrotta, who started out as a winger and then became at one point the best fullback in the world.

The end result of this tactical scenario is the fact that Italy doesnot have any competent widemen. The biggest example of this is the last world cup, when we had Marchisio, Pepe and Iaquinta playing in the wings – we all know how that ended.

The tactical vision of Prandelli, till now, does not include playing out and out wingers. It is the right course now, because we dont have any. However, what is does is rob us of choice, and that is a serious handicap to a footballing nation such as Italy. Sadly, it looks like things will stay the same until the next great tactical revolution occurs in football.