Defence or Attack - which is most important

[Ted Hughes]

Defence may be more important in a results context but attack is more important for the game in general.

If statisticians ran the game then there'd be little room for a cavalier approach, for mavericks, for flair - all things that make football special.

I also think there's a lot of truth in the Clichy 'attack is the best form of defence'. If you look at the three best teams in Europe at the moment they all have an attacking philosophy and in my opinion not great defences.

Accent on defence used to be the rule. Nowardays the most successful teams have the accent on attack. Occasionally someone like Mourinho spoils the party. But it tends to be 'occasionally' Mourinho takes advantage when things go wrong . That is his talent.

[kinkylola]

i don't think it's about attack or defense ... it's about the system as a whole. Attack and defense come from the same set of 11 players, it's how they work together and the game plan they are trying to execute that is most important. Our troubles this season are a great example of what happens when talented players don't gel in a system/with each other.

Speaking of Mourinho, he moved on Mata because he didn't contribute enough in defense ... picking players to a system. Looking at Attack and Defense as two separate systems is not conducive to crafting title winning teams, imo.

[Mikhail Chigorin]

Charles Hughes (and Charles Reep before him) also used statistical analysis to advocate a certain style of play which would create success (of sorts).

The realisation never seemed to dawn that it would lead to the virtual death of football in this country if fully adopted here.

It was bad enough that we got idiotic adherents to it such as Graham Taylor, Tony Pulis and Big Fat Sam.

Uuuuggghhh............

[DoomMerchant]

For the tactical cunts on here:

How would you go about winning at Connect Four....what's your strategery there?

I can win in 3 moves. FACT.

cheers

[Pretty Boy Lee]

I always tell my teams 38 clean sheets can still get you relegated. Probably won't, but the point is clear. I want attacking football.

That said I honestly think both are true. Mourinho wins leagues doing what he does best, grinding out results playing defensive football. We won the league going balls out attack. That's a lesser used strategy because it's risky. Hughes tried it and got sacked, it's not easy to get right.

For us currently, not replacing goals has cost s the title. Now you could argue has we replaced the goals with extra stingy defence we could have won it that way and I wouldn't argue, but the argument is just as valid that Chelsea could have taken the title by buying messi or ronaldo and blowing teams away.

[DoomMerchant]

I always tell my teams 38 clean sheets can still get you relegated. Probably won't, but the point is clear. I want attacking football.

You should pass some coaching advice onto Vieira my friend. He's making the rounds talking to top pros. I'm sure he'd love a meeting with you.

cheers

[phips]

Defense

[Pretty Boy Lee]

I always tell my teams 38 clean sheets can still get you relegated. Probably won't, but the point is clear. I want attacking football.

You should pass some coaching advice onto Vieira my friend. He's making the rounds talking to top pros. I'm sure he'd love a meeting with you.

cheers

Nobody can follow someone as much as you follow me and not fucking love me. Be my personal promoter and get it over with broseph.

Cheers

[DoomMerchant]

I always tell my teams 38 clean sheets can still get you relegated. Probably won't, but the point is clear. I want attacking football.

You should pass some coaching advice onto Vieira my friend. He's making the rounds talking to top pros. I'm sure he'd love a meeting with you.

cheers

Nobody can follow someone as much as you follow me and not fucking love me. Be my personal promoter and get it over with broseph.

Cheers

There are like 12 of us fucking paying any attention to anything so it was only a matter of time.

Cheers

[Pretty Boy Lee]

I always tell my teams 38 clean sheets can still get you relegated. Probably won't, but the point is clear. I want attacking football.

You should pass some coaching advice onto Vieira my friend. He's making the rounds talking to top pros. I'm sure he'd love a meeting with you.

cheers

Nobody can follow someone as much as you follow me and not fucking love me. Be my personal promoter and get it over with broseph.

Cheers

There are like 12 of us fucking paying any attention to anything so it was only a matter of time.

Cheers

Lucky if it's that many. Get back to off topic. It's your turn to get it buzzing

[Im_Spartacus]

MC makes a great point about Charles Reep, did a huge amount of damage to the game over a long period of time with the statistics based approach of 'most goals occur within 3 passes' - leading to the lump it up the pitch methodology.

In the era of sports scientists and the likes of opta collecting stats on everything, it's inconceivable that managers are unaware of the cold hard fact that defence is the key to winning the league.

We bucked the trend last year, conceding 37 goals because we negated that with an exceptional goals scored tally, wheras the rags the year before truly can go down as the luckiest team in the premier league era to win the league as most concede and least scored. Shame on us for not pushing them harder.

But I think armed with these stats, it really brings home just how right Mancini had it, by focusing on the defence in his first year, then letting rip when he had that sorted in the first half of the title season. We may think our reversion to a defensive approach in the second half of that season was odd, but in light of these stats, you can perhaps see why, during a bad run of results, Mancini preferred to remain cautious for the rest of that season in order to get us over the line.

He clearly didn't trust that defence (even though it looked fine to us), which is why he ripped it up and started again the year after.

[Piccsnumberoneblue]

Of course the biggest deciding factor is the wage bill. I wonder how that fits in?
Attack rules. It's what we love to watch. Only weirdos love watching defensive strateg in action.
It's the truth.

[Cocacolajojo1]

Of course the biggest deciding factor is the wage bill. I wonder how that fits in?

There's a strong connection between relative salary budget and final position in the league at the end of the season. There's not a strong connection at all between the relative size of transfer fees and final position in the league at the end of the season. At least according to this book:



Foreverinbluedreams: I read an interview with Manchester City's numbers guy and he claimed that they bought Yaya and Silva because among other things they increased the percentage of ball possession in the opponents half. I also think he said that they studied goals from corner kicks, like a massive number, and started positioning players accordingly. This was under Mancini of course, Pellegrini perhaps takes no heed to that type of numbers. Regardless, stats can be used to make the game duller and to make the game brighter. Depends on what stats you're looking at. I'd be surprised if there's not at least some stats somewhere that form the basis for how Barcelona position their players for example in order to be able to play their possession game.

Thanks for the job Sparty. Appreciate it.

[Im_Spartacus]

Of course the biggest deciding factor is the wage bill. I wonder how that fits in?
Attack rules. It's what we love to watch. Only weirdos love watching defensive strateg in action.
It's the truth.

In the book soccernomics (edit, this is the same book as CCJJ posted above, they renamed it in the 2nd edition), they studied this over the premier league era and found that the wage bill is believed to be something in the region of 80% responsible for the finishing position of a team. They also found that this was true in other countries, and also in the english top flight before the premier league.

They also found that the transfer spend of a club had little or no correlation to the finishing position of a team. They argued that clubs regularly pay irrational transfer fees all the time to persuade clubs to sell against their will, but that wages were generally still based on the 'going rate' for a player of that quality and experience.

I suppose the dominant view in this thread, that attack rules, really then brings in the 'x factor' - entertainment, which must surely be the reason why managers like Pellegrini adopt the 'score 1 more than you' philosophy (It doesn't explain his defensive rotation though, that just seems unnecessary). Spurs fans are well known for demanding quality attacking football, and whilst I reckon they would settle for a season of defensive play to win a league title, as with us, that would quickly turn sour if the style of play didn't improve in subsequent years.

Perhaps the take-away from this thread then, is that if you play like Mourinho, you should probably win the league most years so long as your wage bill was competetive, but if you want to play like Pellegrini you should expect that the price of entertaining football is that some years we will inexplicably under perform, and other years be amazing. It certainly explains this season down to a t.

[Foreverinbluedreams]

Of course the biggest deciding factor is the wage bill. I wonder how that fits in?

There's a strong connection between relative salary budget and final position in the league at the end of the season. There's not a strong connection at all between the relative size of transfer fees and final position in the league at the end of the season. At least according to this book:



Foreverinbluedreams: I read an interview with Manchester City's numbers guy and he claimed that they bought Yaya and Silva because among other things they increased the percentage of ball possession in the opponents half. I also think he said that they studied goals from corner kicks, like a massive number, and started positioning players accordingly. This was under Mancini of course, Pellegrini perhaps takes no heed to that type of numbers. Regardless, stats can be used to make the game duller and to make the game brighter. Depends on what stats you're looking at. I'd be surprised if there's not at least some stats somewhere that form the basis for how Barcelona position their players for example in order to be able to play their possession game.

Thanks for the job Sparty. Appreciate it.

Don't get me wrong mate, I'm not totally dismissing the stats or the application on best practice based upon them. More a case of not letting stats rule the game, leaving room for flair, otherwise the game becomes too mechanical.

I know I'm going to take some flack for this but if you look at the likes of Anerican Football you see an example of where statistics have made the game dull ( imo of course ). I don't want that to happen to football.

[lets all have a disco]

I think you build a house on deep foundations.

[Mikhail Chigorin]

I think you build a house on deep foundations.

You're absolutely right.

Build a great attack and the defence will take care of itself.

[Im_Spartacus]

In terms of the argument 'attack is the best form of defence' - that appears not to be strictly true in England. The number of goals conceded is more clearly correlated with goals scored by the champions in England (57%) - meaning the more you score, the more you will let in. However in most other leagues that's not true, in Spain and Scotland for example there is no relationship at all between goals scored/conceded by the champions, whilst in most other countries the correlation is around 30%, so fairly weak.

What I read into that, is that when you look at each league's history, in almost every league in Europe teams have 3, 4 even 5 years of total dominance in their league, wheras the premier league in the last 10 years has had one spell of 3 titles by the rags, but in the last 5 years it's been a lot more random who's won.

Therefore in leagues where a team is dominant for an extended spell they can arguably go all out for attack and the defence does take care of itself, as they are far far better than any of the opposition (barring perhaps 1 other team eg Barca/Real, Celtic/Rangers). Wheras we know any team can beat any other on their day in the premier league and regularly do, so not conceding in England becomes more important to the champions than in any other country - it's only in a dominance situation where the team is light years ahead of its competitors that all out attack can actually work as a realistic strategy

Essentially, the upshot of all this is that the more competetive the league, the more the reliance falls on not conceding in order to win the league. If you focus on more goals, you will concede more and have less chance of winning the title in competetive leagues.

[Im_Spartacus]

I think you build a house on deep foundations.

You're absolutely right.

Build a great attack and the defence will take care of itself.

See the post above - that's true in leagues where there is total domination by 1 or 2 teams, but not true in more competetive leagues.

If you correlate goals scored to goals conceded by league champions over the last 10 years, you get the following:
England - 57% (score more, concede more)
Germany - 42%
Holland 37%
Italy - 34%
Austria - 34%
Portugal - 34%
Spain - 1%
Scotland - 1% (random, no correlation at all)

Clearly scoring more is more highly correlated to conceding more in the Premier League, so attack really isn't the best form of defence in England, defence is the best form of defence.

The only leagues where your statement is unequivocally true are Spain & Scotland, however 1 or 2 teams operate in isolation to the rest of the league, and blow the opposition away, thus winning the league for Barca and Real is largely based on scoring more than the other. I actually expected this would be the case in Germany, but Bayern have had some stinkers of seasons in the last 10 years meaning that it is still relatively competetive (less so of course in the last 3 years).

[Ted Hughes]

Those stats I take it, are for teams who have won the title in England ?

Otherwise, why is the 'success' of Sam Allardyce & Steve Bruce being used as an example ?

Oh yeah, I've seen it in the other post now.