It is often said that the best World Cup is that one that was held ten years after you were born.
Too true. 1986.
September 26, 2008
When was football best?
Organisational stuff
The flex was a complicated offense, well complicated for 6th graders who could barely discern the difference between man-to-man and a box-and-one. By many accounts, it was complicated for high school varsity players as well, as it involved crisp passing and a lot of coordinated movement away from the ball. So, this small school in Northern Virginia that wasn’t necessarily competing for national championships started teaching the flex offense… in the 6th grade.
Guess what offense we ran in the 7th grade? 8th grade? And so on.
There were two primary results from this process: 1) by the time anyone reached the varsity basketball team the flex offense was second nature and 2) we won a whole lot of basketball games – many more than our talent (or certainly my talent) would have ever dictated.
I wonder to what extent Roy’s famous ‘patterns’ are worked on down the Fulham teams. Roy mentioned at the fans’ forum that he does work with the junior sides, more than perhaps he is obliged to. But I wonder when all the movement off the ball, rehearsed patterns, etc, come into play for younger players or reserve players. Do they get all that expertise, or is this first team only business?
Oops – one last Blackburn thing
Telegraph on the Blackburn game – I forgot I hadn’t posted this. Shows we got things about right with the possession winning bars (given it was an away game, etc). Also Gera and Davies swapping wings confused the density map tracking so we can’t really tell what the team looked like. Looks fairly normal though.
Look at this though. It’s West Ham’s 3-1 win over Newcastle:
Did them on the counter attack, no? West Ham’s forwards spent a lot of time just beyond the halfway line. Newcastle had the edge on what we’re going to have to call ‘field position’ (where the ball is won; the higher up the park the better, generally, as you have less far to go to get to the goal, less danger of losing it in a dangerous area, etc) too. So either West Ham got lucky here, or they played pretty cleverly on the counter attack. Something to watch tomorrow, as our defence isn’t the quickest.
