I’ve been skirting around this on TiFF, but here’s an attempt at the full analysis. Please excuse the messy text down the side, for some reason I wrote the analysis in Photoshop, which is probably not dissimilar to attempting to do artwork in Word.
Anyway, the point is that we rarely see Fulham players dribble do we? The reason for this – I think – is that dribbling loses the team structure. Pass the ball from player A to player B and, if it’s not a cross-field pass, both players can close the opposition down if the pass goes awry/is miscontrolled. Alternatively, if you run straight at a defender and lose the ball, unless someone’s running straight behind you (and why would they do that?) there’s absolutely nobody to close down the opposition and all of a sudden you’ve got an entire team running the wrong direction while the opposition has the ball and is under no immediate pressure.
So we’re not set defensively. Contrast this with our usual passing moves, which will still maintain a sense of shape. This is why Roy Hodgson works so hard with players in practice: you have to be ready to defend with the ball, just as you have to be ready to attack without it. These changes are called transitions, I think, and transitions work smoothly (attack to defence or defence to attack) if everything is controlled.
I’m not explaining this well, but I’m not alone in this: my coaching books tend to take 200 pages to make a single point too, which is why they’re quite hard going. Nevertheless, it’s fairly clear to me that Hodgson would have been absolutely furious with Jimmy Bullard for dribbling in this area of the pitch, a decision that stinks of a man *again* trying to do too much on his own rather than sticking with the team’s strategies.
Anyway, here’s the sequence.
