Total Football

[ninety_minutes]

Do any top-flight teams still try to use this or is it pretty much dead? Does Ajax or the Netherland's MNT still use it? Just curioius if anyone has any insight.

[oneforthemoney]

pretty much dead

if you want to see it in action - awesome stuff

Holland in the 74 World Cup
Holland in the 78 World Cup
Holland in the 2000 Euro

Awesome stuff

The link below you can get all the above mentioned games

http://raresoccervideos.com/

[ninety_minutes]

pretty much dead

if you want to see it in action - awesome stuff

Holland in the 74 World Cup
Holland in the 78 World Cup
Holland in the 2000 Euro

Awesome stuff

The link below you can get all the above mentioned games

http://raresoccervideos.com/

Great - thanks I will check that out - so Holland used it as late as 2000, so it's not too long gone then.

[guado]

its basically dead because it's a tough tacitc - you'd need a good set of versatile players, and in these days it's hard to find even a few versatile guys on a team, so you can imagine its almost impossible to find the amount you need for total football.

[halfnelson31]

can someone explain what total football is?

[Elninho]

I wouldn't say it's totally dead. Total football as a game plan may be dead, but it had plenty of influence on modern tactics, with defenders getting into the attack a lot more than they did 40 years ago, and wingers playing the full length of the pitch instead of being purely attacking players. Overlapping didn't happen much before the 1970s.

[oneforthemoney]

Great - thanks I will check that out - so Holland used it as late as 2000, so it's not too long gone then.

Try the Euro quarter-final in 2000. Awesome stuff

http://www.euro2004.com/History/Year=2000/round=1459/Match=65181/index.html

[oneforthemoney]

can someone explain what total football is?

Total Football was not a new idea when the Dutch picked it up. It had been around since the Fifties when it was known as The Whirl. But it was first Ajax then Holland that brought it to prominence.

The idea was to build a team in which all of the players had equal levels of technical ability and physical strength. In its execution it meant that all the players were capable, at any point in a game, of switching into each other's roles as circumstances demanded.

Anyone could do anything. Defenders became forwards, forwards became defenders.

http://www.ifhof.com/hof/cruyff.asp

[Matt Clark]

It's not dead, it's just become part of the DNA of the modern game and ceased to exist as a distinct tactical entity that is associated with this or that team. "Total Football" lives on in the modern games focus upon technical and tactical versatility, athleticism and a spread of capabilities through the team. It also continues to exist in the various tactical dictats about "defending from the front" and whatnot.

[sidefootsitter]

Under Del Bosque, Real for example would push Roberto Carlos forward on the left. That meant that Zidane, nominally a center/center-left mid, would move a little more toward the middle, taking his marker with him and freeing the left for RC. Raul and Morientes would drift a bit toward the center/center-right.

Defensively, Makelele would slide toward the left covering RC and Figo, hypothetically, would not go as far forward as when he had the ball and cover a center/center-right mid.

If Hierro however went forward, then a midfielder would drop a bit back without the previous rotation.

Then when Michel Salgado went forward, it was sort of a mirror copy of when Roberto Carlos went forward.

Typically, "total football" was more or less a 4-2-2 where either wing-back and a sweeper could move forward if an opportunity presented itself but his spot on the field would have to be covered by a mid and occasionally a forward.

Its pluses are that it allows a team to exploit opportunities and create mismatches and can be a joy to watch when a team like 1972&1974 West Germany or 1974&1978 Holland can come at you from any angle. (modern English clubs like Arsenal and ManU can play the same style)

But it can also look like crap if you have a defensively minded coach who plays two central defenders and a defensive destroyer with no ball skills or speed. When Jupp Derwal insisted on playing Wolfgang Dremmler in midfield, the game took a much more defensive posture because, unlike Overath or Bonhoff, Dremmler rarely/never pushed the ball forward himself.

I also thought that Michels's version kept Cruyiff too far back too many times as Johann would have to slide all over from his attacking mid/withdrawn forward spot to cover a deeper midfield when a Dutch defender went forward. Also, this required him to do way too much running. I'd rather have saved him for the offense.

And so on and so forth...