Like Liverpool 45 years ago, Tottenham Hotspur found that pace means nothing without the ball
The Champions League broadens horizons but it also sharpens perspectives. What may be laudable in domestic competitions can be a handicap on the bigger stage. Aspiring teams, confident of their abilities, are apt to find the Champions League a humbling experience.
Wednesday's opening leg of the quarter-final between Chelsea and Manchester United would have passed muster as a Premier League fixture. It was more entertaining than the series of clinches that are usually the case when these teams meet. The football was fast and eventful and there was plenty of goalmouth action.
In Champions League terms, however, the standard of much of the play was indifferent. There were too many unforced errors and the ball was given away with depressing regularity.
The one moment of genuine class was the superb touch with which Ryan Giggs met Michael Carrick's crossfield pass before setting up Wayne Rooney for the winning goal.
Perhaps we have all been spoiled by Barcelona. Teams of this quality come along once in a generation, if football is lucky, so everybody else is bound to suffer by comparison. Nevertheless, Bar�a are the ones to beat and, as Arsenal showed at the Emirates, they can be defeated. Last season, moreover, Jos� Mourinho's Internazionale found the organisation and the firepower to overcome Barcelona in the Champions League semi-finals and Chelsea and Manchester United have each beaten them in recent tournaments.
But that was then. The likelihood of a team emerging from a generally fallow season in the Premier League to take on Lionel Messi, Andr�s Iniesta, Xavi and the rest and emerge triumphant was always doubtful. Manchester United are now the only serious candidates. Chelsea are hard to take seriously with their coach, Carlo Ancelotti, who was compelled to play Fernando Torres ahead of Nicolas Anelka as Didier Drogba's partner in a Champions League quarter-final.
Watching Torres fumble his way through the match while TV cut away to Roman Abramovich viewing his �50m signing impassively from the back of the stand, was to be reminded of the moment in Citizen Kane when the great man's protege is singing her little heart out and the camera pans up to two stage hands on a platform high above. One looks at the other and their eyes meet in silent disapproval.
On Tuesday night, Tottenham Hotspur could be said to have joined Arsenal in suffering the Camp Nou experience, except that their conquerors were not Barcelona but Real Madrid at the Bernab�u. Spurs, like Arsenal, had a player, Peter Crouch, sent off. Yet, even if they had remained at full strength, it was difficult to see how they would have been able to retain possession long enough to get the ball up to the tall striker.
In the Premier League, Tottenham and Arsenal try to impose their authority on opponents through their ability to retain possession and outpace defences. But, in losing to Real and Barcelona respectively, they found that pace means nothing without the ball and, in both matches, neither could put two passes together without losing it.
It is an old lesson that English teams need to relearn, even if they are now multinational sides born from those overseas areas of the game where the importance of not giving the ball away is drummed into players practically from birth. Bill Shankly's Liverpool were taught it on a foggy night in Amsterdam in 1966, when the Ajax team being nurtured by Rinus Michels won 5-1 and English football first noticed a young Dutchman called Johan Cruyff.
Red Star Belgrade forced the message home when they knocked Liverpool out of the European Cup in 1973 and were applauded off the pitch by the Kopafter winning 2-1 at Anfield with patient, probing football. Shankly dismissed Red Star as "a bunch of fancy men", but his successor, Bob Paisley, later admitted that "our approach was a bit frantic. He treated every match like a war. We discovered it was no use winning the ball if you finished up on your backside in a desperate position".
Tottenham are 4-0 down to Real but, before attempting to salvage something from the tie at White Hart Lane, they have a game against Stoke, who do tend to treat every match as world war three. On Saturday, Spurs will need the pace which carried them past Inter and Milan but, against Real on Wednesday, they will have to find something more profound, if only for pride's sake.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/apr/08/possession-premier-league-europe-lesson
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