THE IMPORTANCE OF THE REMOTE THOSE
Not too long ago I had the opportunity to hear the term suprasuperiority in the world of football, referring to the importance that it has gained in modern times for a team to be “11”.
This that can seem very simple, becomes something fundamental when what we want to express is that the 11 players who are on the field must not only do so in person, but that they must all have an active participation in the game. This active participation must be reflected in both the offensive phase and the defensive phase.
How many times during a match, whether amateur or professional, have we been able to hear phrases and expressions such as: “so-and-so is not involved in the game”, “so-and-so is not there nor is he expected” or “he is not plugged in today”. There are many times that we have been able to hear them or even say them ourselves, and that it completely breaks with the team concept that is worked so hard by the technical bodies of any senior team and also in teams of formative stages.
The active participation of all players corresponds to the role that each of them has within the game cycle and how to participate in each of its phases. In this way, from the tactical intentions that are carried out individually the group will obtain benefits in the form of advantages over the rival. There are different ways to take advantage of these advantages: it can be by occupying free spaces, detecting favorable situations before the rival, and compensating for imbalances that are occurring and that the rival team can take advantage of to hurt us. In short, for all of the above to happen, take advantage of or correct, all players must maintain a relationship with the game. Everyone must be connected to what is happening. From this situation arises the importance of those who are far away.
The distant players, to feel like participants in the game, must identify and recognize their role with respect to the active zone. Francisco Seirul-lo (responsible for the F.C Barcelona methodology) in his dimensioned dynamic spaces divides the field into 3 spaces with respect to the ball. The first zone is called the intervention zone. In this area we recognize the figure of the ball holder and the first defender (player with the intention of stealing or deterring). The adjacent zone is classified as a mutual aid zone and where we find the players close to the ball who become fixers, immediate receivers or second defenders. And finally, the cooperation zone appears, in which there are players with indirect intervention in the game, such as second and third defenders or as intermediate receivers. Their participation is related to the medium and long term.
These spaces that define Seirul-lo are dynamic, and are constantly changing depending on the possessor and their location, orientation and tactical intention. It is the players' job to identify these aspects to transform their role at all times.
We are going to focus on the importance of players who do not have direct intervention in the game, but rather their role is to allow and facilitate things to happen during the phases and subphases of the game. With their location they are influencing so that behaviors that generate advantages occur in the active zone.
With this we chain the maxim with which we started: All players not only play, but all players participate.
We grow up in football with the idea that if we don't touch the ball during the game we have played a bad game. Most footballers think that influencing the game is only done through the ball and that if they are not in the active zone or very close to it they cannot be in a position to perform any function.
It is a mistake to think that way, and it is the job of coaches to convince that sometimes it is more important to facilitate situations in order to take advantage of certain advantages, than to move with the intention of getting closer to the intervention area and canceling beneficial situations that occurred with the first location.
All advantageous situations have a useful life. We must be able to detect them to take advantage of them, if not it is possible that the opposing team can notice them and correct the situation.
A teacher I had in coaching school said that if someone was not in a position to attack they should be prepared to defend. I would add that only one team has the ball and that they must know what to do with it to progress and what to do if they lose it. This process must be known by those near and far. In fact, there are coaches whose work method is based on the behaviors of the block in transitions: defense-attack, attack-defense.
The importance of the distant player is knowing how to differentiate when he should prioritize his behavior as a compensator, when as a long-term receiver, and when as a fixer of a player, players, or an interval.
If the players are able to identify what role they have at each moment, the intervention will always be appropriate.
This role is not always the same. They must recognize what their role is and see how the game is developing in order to be able to modify their functions and assume that there may be simultaneous roles at the same time and that, depending on the game cycle, they have to adopt one or the other.
All this must lead us to a very specific goal: the player is always playing. It does not always do so from possession, but sometimes it does so from help, from cooperation, from detection.
We must therefore as coaches provide them with the necessary tools so that they are able to recognize themselves within the game, so that they can detect threats and opportunities and be able to take advantage of or correct them. There are situations that only those far away can detect.
When coaches set up a structure, we assume that it is not fixed, it is a variable and dynamic formation, prepared to try to respond to all the contexts that occur during a football match. Within this system certain roles appear that players must know in order to subsequently know how to recognize themselves in them.
In the intervention zone, as we have said, are the holder and the first defender. In mutual aid there are short-term fixers and receivers on the offensive level and second defenders who are those who provide help, coverage or adjustments on the defensive level.
The first figure within the plane of the distant ones is the figure of the mediate receiver or long-term receiver. We understand the meaning of this role as that player who is likely to receive the ball and become the holder after a sequence of passes. The intermediate recipient must
Prepare based on who your passer will be, the number of opponents you have and the space you are going to attack. The important thing about this process is to recognize who will be the player who is going to give you the pass, to try to predict how the circulation will go to adapt their orientation, their trajectory, their moment of receiving and the space where they will achieve it. The advantage may come from receiving the pass to the foot or into space, seeking to eliminate opponents from the equation.
It is vitally important that the receiver in the long term is able to detect signs that occur in the ball circulation itself that make him interpret who will be the protagonists and possible interveners of that cycle of the game to know which player could receive the pass from. Likewise, it is necessary to convince the distant player to be patient because it is through his positioning that the team can build different advantages. Advance or delay your intervention can destroy the possible advantage and turn it into a threat, which is why it is necessary to know how to wait for the moment (timing).
As we are talking about players far from the active zone of the ball, we understand that the process to become a holder is long. It is during this phase in which the player or players furthest away from the possessor become compensators of the structure. What we mean by this is that we must not only have the ability to intuit how many passes the ball may be away from, but we must also prepare to be able to balance the team in the event of a possible loss in this phase. This situation places him as the player who provides balance to the system. Our success as players far from the intervention zone lies in the ambivalence of being able to become a threat to the opponent, in the offensive phase, or in becoming a detector of imbalances in order to help, in the defensive phase.
We must work with which trajectory to return to the defensive structure after a loss: diagonal, perpendicular, return to the same axis, change of axis, occupy intermediates...
The compensating player, as we have said previously, must be able to recognize imbalances that occur within the game cycle and that may pose a threat to the structure. If, for example, in a 1-4-2-3-1 system the furthest pivot identifies that a full-back is in second or third height and there is a quantitative decompensation, he must correct his position and merge with the defensive line, or be prepared to jump to intermediate zones to become the first harasser and slow down the offensive transition of the opposing team, with the aim that our team's dropped and outmatched players can return. With all this, those who are distant have the ability to correct unfavorable situations.
Those who are distant can also be fixers. We define a fixer as that player who tries to capture the attention of an opponent with the intention of canceling or delaying his intervention. It can be fixed with or without a ball; In this case, being in the distant zone, we can only be fixers without the ball and allow other players to benefit from their position, generating new contexts from the elimination of rivals.
We can be fixators from the width, which allows spaces to appear inside, or we can fix in height, which will generate spaces to open up in intermediate areas, susceptible to being conquered by teammates or even by oneself, chaining an advantageous situation from fixation.
Thanks to being fixers, distant players continue to facilitate and allow favorable situations in the areas of intervention and mutual aid. We continue generating advantages from remote areas.
The ball has a hypnotic power. Coaches must convince their players that not everything happens in the areas closest to the ball, but that they must be able to see beyond
be a possessor We have to make them believe in the importance of always playing, always intuiting, because only then will the players believe in their value, wherever they are located.
By David López, @euskadifutbolsessions