https://twitter.com/COMEONSYDNEY/status/1758772134875369681
Someone needs to write a few hundred words about this Sydney CB pairing. Is it years of playing together? Is it a better press? Some other change? Is it the complete group across the back?? I’m pretty happy with it for its short life so far.
- Come On Sydney, via Twitter, 18th Mar 2023
Very yes.
Someone needs to write a few hundred words about this; so here it goes.
People watching football tend to be subconsciously aware that what they are watching is not one game but two. The materiel of football is 22 players, green grass, and a football. That statement will tell you that 21 players do not have the ball at any given moment in time; this is where the second game reveals itself. The first game is an object manipulation game which involves kicking a football. The second game is a space management game.
Given my suspicion that free-will ultimately does not exist, I have a corollary that every game is also ultimately solvable. When the rules and materiel are highly limited, such as in tic-tac-toe, this becomes evident. For games like chess, where the rules are more complex and the materiel is fixed, it is possible to show by brute force that the game is solvable but not prove it mathematically. For games involving electro-mechanical meatbags with soul/spirit operating systems, it is way way way harder to show. I think that basketball is possibly the most obvious game to show that we have to show that highly complex games have a tendency to solvability, as evidenced by the fact that basketball is now dominated by 3-point shots. Football however, with more materiel and even more space to play in, is likely solvable but not by the electro-mechanical meatbags with soul/spirit operating systems who play it.
Given that the second game of football is a space management game, then the question posed by this tweet is acutely sensible. Why does the centre-back pairing of Girdwood-Reich and Matthews work so well? Again, this is about space management.
Australian football has for about the past 20 years, been slowly moving away from 4-4-2 as the default formation to 5-3-2. 4-4-2 can either be played as a flat-back 4, or a diamond 4 with the centre two staggered or even playing in front of each other. The reason why 4-4-2 fell out of favour across Europe, is that Real Madrid and Barcelona sides in an effort to not concede goals but still wanting to press forward, kind of defaulted to 5-3-2 with a flat-back 4 with that extra player in the centre of the back line either playing forwards or backwards of that line; to plug the hole at the centre of the park.
5-3-2 though, is not new. 5-3-2 is actually just a modern variation on the so called W-M "Magic Magyars" sides of the early 1950s; which very nearly won the 1954 World Cup with the great Ferenc Puskás as one of the two point players at the top of the front M. W-M gets its name by connecting the dots of the player formations and perhaps it should rightly be called 2-3-3-2.
5-3-2 retains that from M but flattens that back W in the hope to retain the advantage of a defensive sliding push of the back-4 in a 4-4-2 but with that extra player. The problem is that teams need absolute superstars up front to be able to overcome the inherent attacking deficit now being imposed on the formation by stacking that back line.
Australian football by virtue of it being relatively small and with potential superstars never playing the game thanks to Australia having two kinds of Rugby and Australian Rules football being played at professional level, must make do with what it has. If a team in Australia actually does get a superstar then they rebuild the formation accordingly but a lot of the time that simply does not happen. Sydney FC currently has no real obvious superstar. So what do they do about it? Committing 5 to the back while defensively sound, means a lack of firepower up front.
Sydney FC's answer at the moment is to play a hybrid system. The team which was sent out against Adelaide United at the weekend for instance, set out with neither 4-4-2 but 4-3-2-1. 4-3-2-1 in defence assumes that the back 4 will be plugged by the not-quite defensive line of 3 in front of them playing almost as a zig-zag in front of them for a collective back-7. Pushing forwards, 4-3-2-1 breaks back into 4-3-3.
You can see this philosophy with the team sheet notation submitted to the match official before the match:
B: Courtney-Perkins, Girdwood-Reich, Mathews, Grant.
Perhaps more correctly that team sheet notation should read:
LB Courtney-Perkins, LCB Girdwood-Reich, RCB Mathews, RB Grant.
Note how I have deliberately not labelled Girdwood-Reich and Mathews as SW and CB. In the match neither of them reverted to those positions. Neither of them played as Stopper or Sweeper and neither of then played as a proper Centre-Back. Why? Because they didn't need to. In defence, the 3 in front slid back to plug the space in between the flat-back 4.
This also shows in the match stats too. Javi Lopez scored for Adelaide in the 94th minute when Sydney was 2-nil up and any hope of Adelaide stealing a point had long since fizzled out of the game. Even then, this still wasn't a lapse in defensive judgment but a piece of attacking brilliance on the part of Lopez.
Adelaide's underlying stats for that one goal are:
Shots - 14
Shots on Target - 3
14 shots doesn't really tell the story that as Adelaide got more desperate, they set up more and more attacks. However as it was a hot night, a humid night, and one where had this been a horse race would have been described as 'heavy' and not 'firm', those attacks from Adelaide were mostly feeble.
It is the one unpopular stat that really tells the story here:
Balls through - 0
"Balls through" is a stat which fell out of favour in the early 90s because in a perfect game, it should come in as 0. Balls through is that measure of the number of deliveries pushed or sent forward to some player in a nominally unmarked position and into space behind the defence. This was a more popular stat when Route 1 football and just thumping the ball up the pitch was more popular but that style of play fell out of favour. Today, anything other than 0 for 'Balls through' indicates a critical defensive failure. The fact that Sydney FC kept and maintained this, says is that Sydney's back-four really did put in a lot of work and were rewarded for it. However the stat doesn't tell you what kind of work was put in.
Girdwood-Reich and Mathews playing as Left Centre-Back and Right Centre-Back, by virtue of not playing as Stopper, Sweeper, or as a proper Centre-Back, both played right on that imaginary line which defines the back of the back four. Between them they could control the available space behind them by pushing the entire back-four up as a line, or by sliding it back in defence. The whole point of why a team wants a sole Stopper or Centre-Back is to appoint one player as the general manager of space at the back. Remember, that second game of football is a space management game. Really Courtney-Perkins on the left and Grant on the right, had nothing to do with the management of space and their job was to shut down anything on the wings.
Together, Girdwood-Reich and Mathews played as a pair; which because neither of them are markedly better than the other, meant that they played the role general manager of space at the back, together. Actually playing together, without ego, without the responsibility of having space management rest on one player, meant that that push forward and sliding back of the defence was more fluid. Courtney-Perkins and Grant played their part well but Girdwood-Reich and Mathews played their part excellently; together.
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