WHEN SQUARE PEGS FIT ROUND HOLES
Saturday, November 18, 2006
It's easy to pigeonhole players. It's easy to get into the mindset that they can only perform one particular role. But it's also often wrong. Talent should come hand-in-hand with versatility.
by Paul Tomkins 15 November 2006
I've never been of the opinion that players have one set, defined position, and that that is therefore the end of the matter. While you wouldn't want too many goalies deciding they'd rather be left wingers (especially 15 minutes into a game), good players should be adaptable.
Players will always have a position that suits them best, where they are at their most effective. But if it’s a question of getting only 90% from a player in order to get more from the team (in that the alternative would be to play someone whose very best is only 75% of the other player), then that’s what counts.
Providing they have the physical attributes for the role, they should be able to at the very least do a job elsewhere. If Denis Bergkamp could play left-back for the Ajax youth team (albeit only as part of his education as a footballer), then it's something all players, and fans, should be open-minded to.
There are a select few Liverpool players in recent years who have had two distinct careers at the club: a number of seasons spent being one type of player, only to then be switched to a new role.
I began going to Anfield in 1990, when John Barnes was still the most exciting talent in the game: a sublime left-winger. But of course, it was also around the time when he'd had a very successful spell as a striker, having topped the league scoring charts and finished with 28 goals in all competitions. But it was also shortly before a serious Achilles tendon injury robbed him of his pace.
I grew up fairly obsessed with Liverpool, like any football-mad kid who supports a club. But it was only in 1987, when I was 16, that I really fell head over heels in love – and it was following the arrival of Barnes, Peter Beardsley, John Aldridge and Ray Houghton. Kenny Dalglish's side sparked my imagination in a way I'd never previously experienced. They played a kind of football that really was like watching Brazil. And at the heart of it was John Barnes, the man who'd scored arguably the best goal Brazil had ever witnessed three years earlier.
One game shortly after his arrival sticks out in my mind. QPR visited Anfield as the surprise early league leaders in 1987. They weren't so much beaten 4-0 as well and truly dismantled. At one point it looked as if Amnesty International would have to intervene (not to mention the RSPCA, given one Rangers' defender was made to look like a lame cart horse time and time again.)
One moment stands out to this day. ‘Digger’ won the ball on the halfway line and sprinted forward towards the edge of the area, drifting to his left past one defender before almost defying the laws of physics with a turn to his right which took him past England international Paul Parker. It would have been easy to blast a shot at goal, but he had the coolness and presence of mind to slip the ball under a young David Seaman – who premiered his look of bemusement mixed with dejection which he would later reprise for Nayim, Ronaldinho, and of course, most delightfully, Michael Owen at Cardiff.
By the time 2nd-placed Nottingham Forest arrived at Anfield in April 1988, and were beaten 5-0 in what was widely regarded as the finest-ever display on these shores, we pretty much knew that anything was possible. After all, by then Steve Nicol (another supremely versatile player) had scored a hat-trick from left-back away at St James' Park. Teams had been routinely thumped for nine months by that stage. Barnes was the star of a special show.
In 1991 Graeme Souness inherited an ageing squad from Dalglish. Souness then sold some of its better players (Beardsley, Houghton) and replaced them with inferior ones. Alan Hansen had to retire as age, and dodgy knees, caught up with him. But perhaps the biggest factor was Barnes losing his ability to ghost past people and leave them for dead.
Barnes would later be reborn in a midfield role under Roy Evans. His waistline may have expanded to mirror Jan Molby's, but his game started to resemble the great Dane's, too: he hardly got around the pitch, but for three or four years he simply never gave the ball away.
While Barnes is only regarded as a legend on the basis of his salad days, when he took wingplay to new breathtaking heights, he remained a class act even during his later, erm, hamburger days.
Of the current team we know Steven Gerrard has the ability to play anywhere. And of course, his position on the pitch comes with a raging debate, and ludicrous suggestions that Benítez chooses to play him on the right merely to prove a point. And there was me thinking it was so he could have a free role to ghost infield (admittedly something he didn't really do at Arsenal), in the way top-class "central" players of the calibre of Ronaldinho, Zidane and Figo have over recent years.
But it is Jamie Carragher who is enjoying a new career, now remade as a centre-back after the first half of his playing days were spent at full-back.
But in Carra's case it was a question of returning to the role he'd already been earmarked for. In 1999 Gérard Houllier said that one day Carragher would be Liverpool's Marcel Dessaily; he just wasn't ready at that stage. He had grown up as a kid in central midfield and central defence, but couldn't grow up quickly enough in those roles in senior football. It was a struggle.
Having been steady for years on either the left or right full-back slot, he spent the first two seasons of Benítez's reign excelling at the heart of the defence. While he's not been as his best this season, it's a timely (if unpleasant) reminder that he's not superhuman after all.
Perhaps the greatest transformation ever seen at the club was made by Ray Kennedy. When he arrived at Liverpool from Arsenal, as a battering ram of a centre-forward, it was obviously in this role in which Bill Shankly intended him to play. Things didn’t exactly go as planned. Kennedy failed to make a spot in the side his own, and found himself in the reserves.
The transformation under Bob Paisley from a big and burly centre forward to an artful left-sided midfielder in 1975 is still seen by some as the greatest-ever manager’s long-term tactical masterstroke. Of course, the main credit should go to Kennedy, as he was the man who took to the field and adapted so wonderfully.
Kennedy was a tall, upright kind of player. Watching him run, there seemed no way he could be a footballer; he was in the same club as Patrick Vieira and Chris Waddle in that he simply didn’t look the part, didn’t move naturally.
Put a ball at Ray’s feet, however, and suddenly it was the most natural sight in the world. It stayed close to his side like an obedient sheepdog. He was suddenly a master, in control, calling the shots. Some players are busy, but busy themselves in going nowhere; Ray took his time, but always got there, always arrived.
In being upright, it meant he also played with his head up –– the sign of a good player. You need time on the ball to be able to lift your head, and only good players get time on the ball. You also need to know your control is perfect to take your eyes from the ball and survey the field. He had such quality he could look completely natural in the role.
But the debate of where certain players should be deployed will always come back to Steven Gerrard. Momo Sissoko's injury might seem the obvious cue to move Gerrard back into the middle, and that may happen in the coming months.
But it's also true that on the right he has the ability to put in dangerous crosses, as well as the licence to get into advanced central positions in a way that can make him harder to pick up. Another bonus is that leaving gaps down the right is less immediately dangerous than leaving gaps in the centre, and that's why so many great central talents (such as those mentioned earlier) start from wide positions when drifting around the pitch. It's not like Benítez is doing anything other top managers haven't done in recent years with the best attacking midfielders in the world.
Of course, Arsenal was a game where this ploy didn't really work. And yet at Chelsea, starting on the left (an even more outrageous misuse if his talent to some!), Gerrard ghosted into some great goalscoring positions and really should have won the game for the Reds. Had his aim been just a few inches better on a couple of occasions, the decision would have been seen as a tactical masterstroke.
Maybe the time is right to move him back into a central starting position, to try something different in the absence of Sissoko. That's up to the manager to decide. But it was only a little over a year ago that the Reds were struggling in the league, and the problem was remedied to a large degree by switching Gerrard to a regular role on the right wing.
But hey, playing Gerrard out wide never works, does it?
Finger Acrobatics Performed by Avloomat @ 1:14 PM,
