WHO WOULD YOU pick in your Premier League team of the season so far? Many commentators have given theirs in recent weeks, and the following choices for goalkeeper and back four have been quite popular: Courtois; Ivanovic, Terry, Cahill, Azpilicueta.
What these five players have in common is that they have all been regulars in the Chelsea side that are most people’s favourites to win the league this season.
The Londoners’ defence has supposedly been so superior that many critics feel it’s acceptable to populate their teams exclusively with Blues defenders.
And this is not an unreasonable position to take based purely on stats. With only 19 goals conceded, Chelsea boast the joint second best Premier League defensive record (only Southampton have conceded less). Moreover, their concession of just three goals at home since the start of the season is far superior to any other side.
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Yet something strange happened in Chelsea’s most recent league fixture — their apparently water-tight defence conceded five goals away to Spurs. How could so many acclaimed defenders suddenly look so ordinary? Even Nemanja Matic, who many believe to be the best defensive midfielder in the Premier League, had a torrid afternoon. Did all those players simply have an off day? Was the result more down to the attacking brilliance of Harry Kane and co? Or is there a deeper issue at play?
The lost art of defending
It has long since been established that defending in football is not what it once was. In the Premier League era, the goals per game ratio has increased substantially since the onset of 2009-10 campaign. Before then, the average goals per game exceeded 2.65 in just three seasons out of 17. Ever since, excluding this season, the average goals per game has been higher than 2.75 on all five occasions.
As Jonathan Wilson wrote in The Guardian last year: “Watching Arsenal’s dismal resistance at the weekend, or the shambles of Cardiff against Liverpool, the catalogue of mistakes in Tottenham’s 3-2 win against Southampton or even the thrilling chaos of el clásico, it is tempting to suggest teams have forgotten how to defend.”
Furthermore, one pundit who expands on Wilson’s assertions and believes defending has been irrevocably altered in recent years is Gary Neville. In his Telegraph column, Neville wrote about the ostensible death of defending as we knew it in fairly equivocal terms:
“According to Opta, in the first year of the 20-team top league 79 defenders played more than 30 games. Now you’re down to 44. So everything we talk about with defences — telepathy, consistency, playing together regularly — starts to break down. United’s back-four, for example, is ever changing. But I see no road back to the old ways. It’s like the guy who loves Ceefax pining for its return in the face of the internet. It’s not coming back.”
Neville added that when he was starting off as a player, “60-70 per cent of your training ground work would be defensive”. Now however, while it would be overly harsh to say there is a dismissive attitude about defending, it certainly seems that — generally speaking — it’s no longer the priority that it once was.
In an interview with TheScore.ie last October, German journalist and author Uli Hesse suggested the recent decreased attention paid to stopping the opposition actually had its basis in the pioneering Dutch footballing style of the 70s, explaining that it was also partially to blame for his own country’s current problems at full-back.
“One of the cornerstones of the Dutch approach is that you teach every player to be an offensive player. You teach every player to be an offensive midfielder. The Dutch reasoning was that it’s easier to teach somebody how to defend than how to be creative.
“They’d say, if we need defenders, we can always turn one of our midfielders into a defender. And that’s by and large what has happened over the last 10 to 12 years. Even some of our centre-backs are almost like midfielders. And with Germany, some of our defenders are offensive midfielders playing left-back and right-back. And that’s a problem at this level.”
David Luiz and ‘modern defenders’
The one player perhaps most openly associated with the death of defending as we know it is David Luiz. Very much coming across as the anti-Bobby Moore at times, rather than being no-nonsense, the charismatic Brazilian occasionally seems all-nonsense.
Famously divisive, Luiz’s continuing success in the game appears to baffle some pundits. The overriding reaction to PSG signing him for a fee of £50 million last summer was derision. This scepticism became even more vociferous when the player put in a disastrous performance during Brazil’s 7-1 World Cup semi-final loss to Germany.
On Luiz’s abysmal performance in arguably the biggest game of his career to date, former Chelsea defender Frank Leboeuf noted: “The problem became quite obvious at the World Cup. He was playing up front rather than in defence after just three minutes of play in the semi-final against Germany. That’s the thing that scares me.”
Yet what’s odd is that, in the context of the tournament, Luiz’s collapse ostensibly came out of nowhere. Until then, he had looked thoroughly assured at the heart of Brazil’s defence and even scored a superb free-kick against Colombia in the quarter-finals, prompting many people to prematurely pencil him in to their teams of the World Cup. Hence, good players surely can’t become bad overnight, can they?
All of which brings us to the crux of this piece: what if, not just David Luiz, but all modern defenders were overrated to a degree? The logic is as follows — during the 2014 World Cup, until the semi-finals, Brazil did not face any team that even approached the level of quality which Germany possessed.
The hard-working likes of Cameroon and Mexico were bound to stick with the numbers-behind-the-ball approach against the fabled hosts, only attacking their opponents on rare occasions. Germany, on the other hand, showed no such apprehension, with Luiz suddenly put under pressure by the one team Brazil faced that were willing to attack them relentlessly, exposing their previously hidden defensive flaws in the process.
Arsenal and the Premier League’s ineptitude
And can the David Luiz theory not be applied to the Premier League at large as well? At certain points last season, the central defensive pairing of Per Mertesacker and Laurent Koscielny drew considerable acclaim. The Gunners went numerous games unbeaten with the duo together in defence.
Yet what stats fail to measure is the opposition’s approach to facing Arsenal. Aside from a couple of top teams, every other Premier League side effectively sets up against Arsene Wenger’s men in the same way — they acknowledge that they won’t have much possession and thus, need to sit back and attempt to sporadically hit them on the counter attack (which does tend to work on occasion, of course).
But one ostensible reason why their defence looked so good was that they were playing against defensive-minded teams often unwilling to risk leaving their own half of the field to pressurise Mertesacker and co. As soon as they came up against a team willing to seriously attack them (Chelsea or Man City), the outcome was a catastrophic 6-0 or 6-3 loss.
This is not to suggest that particularly bad defenders can thrive at big clubs. If you are completely hopeless á la Djimi Traore, you’ll soon get found out regardless. But it seems to be the case that the gap between the Premier League’s best and worst defenders is nowhere near as wide as is the case for strikers and to a lesser extent, midfielders (i.e. the players who invariably are obliged to win games for their teams).
Moreover, the list of attackers who have flopped after big moves to top clubs is far longer than it is for defenders. For every Pascal Cygan, there are about 10 Chelsea-era Fernando Torres-style mishaps. The reason, it seems, is that the greater burden of expectation to score goals regularly tends to make life much more difficult for strikers.
Conversely, when a defender with a lower-tier club joins a top side, their improvement often seems vast. Take Gary Cahilll, for instance. The England international has thrived since joining Chelsea for a relatively modest fee of £6million, but would the Londoners be much worse off now if, rather than Cahill, they had instead chosen to sign another promising young centre-back — say, Ryan Shawcross — at the time?
On the other hand, if on that famous Deadline Day in January 2011, Chelsea had spent their money on a superior striker to Torres, it seems reasonable to suggest they might have acquired at least one extra Premier League title by now. Particularly last season, the Stamford Bridge outfit were vying for the league until the last few games, and the presence of a world-class forward in the team would conceivably have pushed them over the line.
It has long been a sports cliché to suggest that the best form of defence is attack, but this concept increasingly seems to be the prevailing philosophy in both the Premier League and European football in general, even if certain managers (Jose Mourinho) are still much more proficient at organising backlines than others (Brendan Rodgers).
And tellingly, the sense that defenders are no longer as respected as they once were is backed up in a study by the International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) Football Observatory published earlier this week. It calculated the most valuable players in the world and of the top 120 footballers named, there were a paltry 15 centre-backs and six full-backs.
Therefore, the art of defending may not be dead, but it’s certainly not as prestigious as it once was.
