Who’d be a defender? It seems a pertinent question to ask amid the rush of goals and penalties in the opening three rounds of the Premier League season, which have yielded a goals-per-game ratio of 3.68. Like a bowler in T20 cricket, today’s defenders appear cast as stooge in football’s top-flight pantomime and defenders from past eras are not short on sympathy – starting with Sean Dyche, the Burnley manager and one-time centre-back, who says rules changes have made the job of defending “a lot harder”.
“I get the idea they’re trying to promote attacking play and therefore make it harder on defenders in theory [giving] more goals, excitement, but there’s got to be a fairness to it,” he told i on Tuesday. “You’ve got to give a defender a chance to defend.”
The amendment to the handball rule which leaves Dyche “telling a player you can’t use your arms for balance in the box” is just the latest challenging addition to the job spec according to Gary O’Reilly, a centre-back with Tottenham Hotspur, Brighton & Hove Albion and Crystal Palace in the 1980s. He believes changes to the Laws of the Game have “put fear in the minds of every defender”.
As O’Reilly recalls, it was Sepp Blatter, as Fifa general secretary, who set football on its current path after the 1990 World Cup delivered the competition’s lowest goals-per-game ratio of 2.21. “You wanted players to entertain and excite and they couldn’t because the big bruiser at the back had hacked their ankles again. Fifa couldn’t get bigger goals so built the bias towards the striker.
“When was the last time you saw a player lunge at an opponent in the box? It has gone. It was a lunge-fest back in the 80s, you just dived straight in and if you got the ball it was a bonus. Now it’s about containment.”
David Weir, the former Everton, Rangers and Scotland defender, sees more defensive errors as inevitable given the current high-risk trend for building up from the back in the face of high-pressing forwards.
“I don’t think there’s a lack of top centre-backs, I just think the game is heavily weighted against them in terms of the rules, the nature of how they’re coached and what’s expected of them,” Weir remarks. “The nature of the game now probably makes them take more risks and puts them in positions at times where they can look awkward and make mistakes.”
For all the injustices already brought by the tweaked handball rule, Weir’s bigger bugbear is the constant fouls awarded to players simulating contact. Like O’Reilly, he would like to see forwards punished. “I get frustrated with players falling over without contact and referees giving fouls and free-kicks. The game stops too much. It’s becoming more and more a game of set-pieces and corners.”
The key for the defender today is anticipation. “You have to get there first,” explains Weir. “You have to be in a decent position to intercept. Athleticism has become really important because of that in terms of [having] the speed and athleticism to get into areas to deal with things.”
Doubly important now that less priority is given to defensive work without the ball in training. “[Being] without the ball and working as a unit and being a defender first and foremost, at the top level especially, is less coached.”
Another view comes from Michael Ball, the former Everton, Rangers, PSV Eindhoven and Manchester City left-back, who believes defenders have to be “cuter and more clever”. Twenty years ago, if he mistimed a slide challenge, “the referee would say ‘unlucky’ and you might get a booking at a push.” Today, he suggests, “if I’m against a winger you have to probably just man-mark them. That’s the only way you’re not going to give the ref a decision.”
On this point, Dyche adds: “We’ve got to be careful because it’ll end up like shadow play – you can’t more or less touch a centre-forward now because it’s a foul, the referee gives it immediately lots of times so it becomes shadow defending. I think tactical shape and understanding from defenders will be more and more important because going one v one with a player is just more and more difficult.”
There is one area where defenders can help themselves according to O’Reilly. “What’s going out of the game now in defending is verbal communication,” he says, citing conversations with Premier League coaches about the difficulty of “getting players to talk to each other”. Ball concurs: “There was always the big strong centre-half who’d go and attack any header from a goal-kick and put his body on the line and someone cuter alongside him to sweep up. There are probably better players out there now who haven’t got that leadership alongside them to help.”
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