Photo: Peter Byrne/PA
In March 2019, Manchester United went to Paris Saint-Germain in the last 16 of the Champions League, trailing 2-0 from the first leg. At halftime they were already 2-1 ahead. Needing another goal on away goals, their manager, Ole Gunnar Solskjær, pulled off a counter-intuitive masterstroke: he sat back. Almost nothing happened for half an hour. PSG pressed on hesitantly, at first bewildered and then anxious. And then Solskjær unleashed his attack on panicking opponents, United won a penalty - a crazy, modern, European handball, but a penalty nonetheless - and went through.
That was Solskjær at his peak, the result that prompted Gary Neville to ask where he wanted his statue. Solskjær's record at the time was P17 W14 D2 L1; he was still floating in the euphoria of not being José Mourinho. His struggle to implement attack structures had not yet come to light. But where he had proven himself adept was reading and manipulating the emotional flow of a game.
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It is of course a high-risk strategy. Had PSG held on, everyone would have wondered why Solskjær had held back, why he had essentially reduced the second half to a 15-minute game. But it worked because Solskjær understood that PSG was scarred by failure and prone to buckling under pressure, while his United side at the time had complete faith in him as a conduit for the comeback spirit of 1999.
They waited and left when he told them, and did so with greater ferocity and faith in that last quarter of an hour than they could have done in the full 45 minutes, when any thwarted attack could have undermined self-confidence, when a successful counter have doubled their task.
Playing on the emotions of a match is a trait that has gone out of fashion. For years, English football was obsessed with heart and passion and was often skeptical of systems and tactics. Now it feels like there is an overcorrection. There is an obsession with processes.
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Data provides fascinating insights into the game, helping to tighten pressing structures and increase efficiency everywhere on the pitch, but there is a danger of losing the humanity of players, the fact that they have emotions, ups and downs - and that Crucially, these are not inevitable.
It may be that the statistics show that a striker has always been inconsistent, but over time the player will convert one in ten chances over the course of his career. But in a slump, should the manager simply wait for a return to the mean? Or try to address what's wrong and throw an arm around a shoulder/talk some bullshit/suggest a technical or tactical adjustment and maybe try to improve that ratio to one to nine?
The idea that trust and application are preset and unchangeable, perhaps even illusory, is one of the great lies of football's statistical revolution. Data is not predestination. But it's not just about individual players; as Solskjær showed in Paris, matches also have their mood that can be exploited. Players can find new levels when the wind is in their tails; even the very best can collapse under pressure.
Take, for example, Brighton's recent 4-2 win over Tottenham or Liverpool's 2-0 defeat to Burnley. In both cases, the team that ultimately won was completely dominant, should have been further ahead and then unexpectedly became nervous as the seemingly defeated opponent showed signs of resistance. It wasn't enough on either occasion, but it was for Crystal Palace as they came back from 2-0 down to draw at Manchester City, with the equalizer the result of a panicky Phil Foden hack.
There are few absolutes in football; almost everything is contingent. Philosophies are important as guiding principles, but are never 'good' in themselves; Football is not a problem waiting to be solved. What may be appropriate in one situation may not necessarily be so in another.
Aston Villa thrived with their high offside line this season, but at Old Trafford it cost them. They have looked tired since the second half of the match against Arsenal: 2-0 up against Manchester United, despite a storm they were no longer able to press with the intensity needed to prevent opponents from passing passes into the measure space behind the back. four. And perhaps that wasn't just a physical issue: would it be a surprise if players, exhausted by the Christmas schedule, struggled to apply the detailed positional instructions, or to make the complex tactical decisions that have become so integral in the modern game?
"It has nothing to do with coaching anymore," Jurgen Klopp said before Liverpool's 4-2 win over Newcastle. "It's just a matter of recovering and then having a meeting, that's how it is." That perhaps explains the raggedness and energy, the ruthlessness but also the lack of precision of Liverpool's games from the goalless draw against Manchester United onwards (although it may simply be a feature of Darwin Núñez's repeated playing).
To some extent, that's the fun of Christmas football. The lack of time for preparation creates a lack of control, a rawness of it, so that even players as composed as Rodri end up making fundamental mistakes (the downside is the increased risk of injury and, if such things hinder you , you, a lack of perceived 'quality').
It appears to have become an increasingly exhausted Arsenal, whose dependence on Gabriel Martinelli and especially Bukayo Saka has been exposed. It's strange about Mikel Arteta's time as Arsenal manager that they have a miserable run of four or five games every season, starting in December or January. Arteta once drew a heart and a brain holding hands as part of a team talk, but the feeling is that the head, the process, has been given too much priority.
The ideal is that the two work in harmony and that managers adapt the processes represented by the brain to the psychological and physical state represented by the heart. Klopp has managed to recognize how little coaching is possible at this time of year. Others don't. Even the best processes are contingent.