Boring our way up the table

Fulham: Last on Match of the Day for the fourth time in a row!  Are we that boring?  It depends what you are looking for.

In this country we are rightly proud of our chaotic football league.  This season’s unpredictability has only added to that fun.  If you watch enough matches you can be sure of seeing a handful of end-to-end thrillers, people losing their rags, people losing their rags even more in response, people making bad tackles, people running really fast, and sometimes even some good football.  What we don’t get too excited about is the cerebral side of the game, the tactical battle.  English fans, journalists, and managers have never really got involved in that.  Roll your sleeves up, get stuck in:  who wants it more?

And so on.  The trouble comes when this approach to football runs its course.  What happens when both teams want it 100%?  What Roy Hodgson has done at Fulham is create a tactically sound framework on which to build an English football team.  So while our players do usually want it 100% (Jimmy Bullard sometimes wants it 110% but some people worried that Seol only wanted it about 30% when he was getting picked), we also have the knowledge that if our players do give their 100% we will probably not lose the match unless something odd happens.

Surely this ought to be worthy of considerable praise from the media. A few seasons ago we had just drawn 3-3 with Watford at Vicarage Road. At the time I had just read John Foot’s excellent “Calcio”, a book about Italian football that contained the purist’s suggestion that a perfect game of football must end 0-0, that being the only score possible if neither side makes a mistake.  Now, we can argue all we want that there is more to life than avoiding mistakes, but in a results business, having a team that doesn’t make mistakes is as good a way as any for a manager to keep his job. 

And here we were drawing 3-3 with Watford.  I forget the details, but all six goals were probably farcical.  At least two of ours came from goalmouth scrambles.  There was effort everywhere, skill probably, but it was not always obvious.  Such fare was by no means uncommon then. Chris Coleman had a terrific eye for a player but his tactical play seemed to have descended into nothingness, with match after match decided by whichever team took advantage of the chances it happened upon. 

From there we took a step down the evolutionary ladder and saw Lawrie Sanchez’s attempt to replicate Northern Ireland’s success with a league side.  He transplanted all available Northern Ireland players to Motspur Park, and was a bit unlucky with how things went, but try as I might I can’t remember anything remotely tactical about the way we played.  Certainly Danny Murphy and Steven Davis, the central midfielders at the time, never did seem to see the ball.  It was occasionally interesting to watch, but when the wheels came off they really came off, to the point that Shefki Kuqi became our attacking plan A and Dejan Stefanovic our defensive mainstay. 

Roy Hodgson took some time to sort the mess out.  In retrospect we should have expected this.  The man’s a coach above all else, his methods are drummed in through practice rather than through snappy one-liners and alchemic substitutions. He reasons that top golfers spend their time practising key elements over and over, top musicians do the same, so why shouldn’t top footballers spend their time on boring things like positioning if this is what is going to make a difference on the field?  So yes, it took time for this to bed in, and perhaps the surprise is that we got away with it and stayed up at the end of last season.  He really did have a lot of work to do.

But this year is a different story.  We started off shakily, but Hodgson’s tried and trusted methods have been reinforced rather than abandoned, the canny coach dogmatically sticking to principles that he knows will work in the medium term.  And they have.  Hodgson has some famous names in his first choice eleven, but the team is greater than the sum of its parts.   The media is now fixated on Jimmy Bullard and Brede Hangeland, but the team managed to hold Spurs without either (Bullard went off after 37 minutes; Hangeland had “the flu”).  Chris Baird, much troubled in his Fulham career to-date, came in for Hangeland and had a stormer.  That’s coaching. 

So why don’t we see Gary Lineker and Lee Dixon puzzling over this on Match of the Day?  Why isn’t the public interested in how a small team from West London is turning into one of the toughest opponents in the game?   Why isn’t it interested in how players like John Paintsil, Aaron Hughes, Paul Konchesky, Danny Murphy, Clint Dempsey, Simon Davies and Bobby Zamora are playing at such a high level? 

Because football is, I suppose, mainly about entertainment, and unless you’re unusually fascinated by the inner workings of how things work on a football pitch, you’re not going to be entertained by a team that has seemingly mastered the art of drawing 0-0.  Fair enough.  But surely there ought to be a sackful of managers who would love to know how to do this?  Surely there should be fans all over the country who would benefit from learning why it is that their team concedes lots of goals?   Roy Hodgson has put together a perfect case study in the art of coaching a solid defensive team, and it deserves more attention that it is getting.  This is not just about Brede Hangeland and Jimmy Bullard.