The rustiness on display in Germany since play restarted shows how valuable regular drilling is but Dortmund v Bayern was an overtly modern game of exceptional qualityAll sporting events have their myths, the useful narratives hung on them as the flags are lowered on the final day and we have to work out what the past month, all that effort, all that emotion, all that money, was for. Remember how the 2012 Olympics in London brought us together as an open, multicultural nation inspired to a more active future? The 2006 World Cup, we were told, was about the patriotic celebration of a new Germany. And perhaps it was.However immersion in the Bundesliga over the past three weeks suggests the...
Erling Braut Haaland’s ability to make the game look so easy is reminiscent of the Brazilian and Russian prodigies, whose cautionary tales show talent should not be taken for grantedOf course it was Erling Braut Haaland who scored the first Bundesliga goal after the resumption. Who else could it have been? Nobody else in the modern game seems to play with such a disregard for complication. Nobody else seems to treat the basic problem of getting the ball from his foot to the back of the net with the brusque clarity of Alexander contemplating the Gordian Knot. Nobody else seems such an embodiment of tomorrow. Related: World watches with relief as Bundesliga makes a safe return – for now Related:...
Marton Bukovi showed his courage in wartime Zagreb but the Hungarian also rethought football tactics. Today’s coaches should use their layoff constructively“What did you do in the war, Mr Bukovi?” “I invented the false 9. What did you do?”That wasn’t all Marton Bukovi did during the second world war. The Hungarian coach – quite possibly the greatest tactical mind football has known – found himself in Zagreb, coaching Gradjanski, when the conflict began. When the Ustashe seized power and began enacting antisemitic legislation, his position became insecure, given he was the son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He, in as much as religion bothered him at all, seems to have identified as Christian, and there is a...
Recent transfer activity suggests that the La Liga side may be moving towards a more expansive approach to the gameE lite football is more attacking now than at any time since the coming of systematisation in the mid-60s. Between 1994‑95 – when the Champions League first incorporated quarter-finals after the group stage – and 2007-08, there were only two seasons in which an average of more than three goals per game was scored in the knockout stages. Since then there has been only one season when that average has not been higher than 3.0, and in each of the past three it has been higher than 3.5.As José Mourinho’s star has waned, there has been only one real exception to...
The dominant style of football’s hyper-capitalistic age has its origins in the unlikeliest of placesA training field near Ostfildern, in the forest south-east of Stuttgart. It’s February 1983, and local sixth-tier side Viktoria Backnang are playing a friendly against Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s Dynamo Kyiv, who are wintering at Sportschule Ruit. For Viktoria’s young player-manager, Ralf Rangnick, it is a revelatory experience. When the ball goes out of play for a throw-in early on, Rangnick counts the Dynamo players, half-believing they had sneaked an extra man on to the pitch. They hadn’t, but such was the ferocity of their pressing that it felt as if they had. And so a seed was planted that has had a profound impact on football’s tactical...