Even from his early days as a player, Pep Guardiola was obsessed with the way footballers received the ball. With many passes travelling from back to front in a game, Guardiola noticed that many players would first take a touch to control the ball while using their body as a shield to prevent an opponent stealing it from them.
Guardiola was adamant this was wrong, on multiple levels. For a start, it seriously narrowed the field of vision. Players should always be looking for the forward pass, but by controlling the ball with their back to the opposition’s goal they could only see a backwards one.
Players lost around three seconds receiving the ball this way, Guardiola thought, including the time it took to turn with the ball and then the time it took to pick a pass and execute it. It also allowed opponents extra time to draw closer for the tackle – so the idea that it was safer controlling the ball with their back to the opponents was deceptive.
To receive the ball in the correct way, it required more spatial awareness in preparation: recognising where the opposition were positioned, calculating how close they were, in which direction they were travelling.
But executed correctly, letting the ball run across the body and receiving it almost side on, the players can immediately see the entire field before them: where team-mates are located, where the spaces are, which angles have opened up.
Legend has it that when Romario turned up at Barcelona in 1993, it was something Guardiola noticed about his game. Romario was one of the world’s most feared goalscorers – the leading scorer in the Dutch Eredivisie for three consecutive seasons, winning multiple trophies with PSV Eindhoven.
But Guardiola felt Romario could improve his game if he changed the way he received the ball and told him so. Romario was about to go on and win the 1994 World Cup with Brazil as player of the tournament, and be crowned the best player in the world that year, and there was this 22-year-old midfielder telling him he wasn’t doing the basics properly.
For those interested in Guardiola’s philosophy on receiving the ball – and sometimes he had to convince them – he enjoyed spending hours on the training pitch with them after sessions until it became second nature. It is one of the basics taught to children that Guardiola realised could be forgotten by the time players progressed to established professionals.
When Guardiola became a manager, it was a fundamental he continuously drilled into his players – and remains so.
Any time he spots it in training he will remind a player of the correct technique, over and over again if necessary. It leaned into the philosophy of his great friend and mentor Johan Cruyff that sometimes the simplest things in football can be the most difficult. “The easiest way is often the hardest,” Cruyff wrote in his autobiography My Turn. “I see touching the ball once as the highest form of technique. But to be able to touch the ball perfectly once, you need to have touched it a hundred thousand times in training.”
It also shaped one of Guardiola’s guiding conceptions about controlling a game. “When the ball is in the air, it is half and half,” he once said of the chances of retaining possession. “When the ball is at your feet, the ball is yours.” Receiving the ball in Guardiola’s way is vital to his intense style of football. And so many players have been influenced and improved by his simple observation.
It was something the Catalan persistently raised with Raheem Sterling in training. Guardiola noticed Sterling had a habit of killing the ball with the outside or bottom of his boot, and repeatedly went through how to change it during training. Sterling played some of his career’s best football at Manchester City.
In Rodri, the coach may have found his ultimate disciple. When Rodri signed for Manchester City for £62.8m in summer 2019, he came from the hard school of Diego Simeone at Atletico Madrid and Guardiola felt the Spanish international relied a little too much on his strength and physicality. Three years later, after much sculpting, Guardiola considered him one of the best defensive midfielders in the world.
Now he is a Treble winner, scorer of a Champions League final winner, envy of the world’s clubs. In a team of Kevin De Bruyne, Erling Haaland and Bernardo Silva, Rodri is arguably City’s most important player.
On Tuesday night, following a man of the match performance in an unexpectedly difficult comeback win against Red Star Belgrade in the Champions League, Guardiola declared him the best midfielder in Europe. “He’s an extraordinary holding midfielder,” he said, while also pointing out: “When he arrived he wasn’t this type of player.”
You can see Rodri’s progression in his number of touches of the ball: 2,916 in his first Premier League season, 3,191 the second, 3,246 the third, 3,363 the fourth. Time and again Rodri will receive the ball in the most pressured of places in his own half and spring an attack.
This season he has touched the ball 90 more times than any other player in the league and is on course to surpass last year’s total.
Top of the table for all-time most touches in the Premier League (since records began in 2006-07) is Kyle Walker, with 29,415. Second is Jordan Henderson, with 28,816. Yet Walker’s average per season is 2,226, Henderson’s was 2,058 – and Rodri’s is 3,179.
David Silva – No 9 on the all-time touch list with 23,450 – averaged 2,345 at City. Fernandinho, who occupied Rodri’s role before him, had 2,207.
If Rodri, 27, stays in England for the majority of his career and stays fit, he will likely become the Premier League player with most touches since records began. It may be a little-celebrated accolade, but perhaps it is the closest a player can get to perfection.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/4g9NSH6
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