Is there anything more tedious than a coach, former player or TV pundit banging on about the importance of having centre-backs who can “play it out from the back”, or how having two defenders who are “comfortable on the ball” is as essential as consuming too much turkey at Christmas?
Call me old fashioned, but I like my central defenders to, you know, defend. Give me a big ugly brute whose primary function is to thwart attacks, make a striker’s life hell and give a simple 10-yard pass to someone with more ability any day over a player with delusions of grandeur that they are as accomplished on the ball as Andrea Pirlo.
Tony Adams, Martin Keown, Jaap Stam, Ledley King, John Terry, Fabio Cannavaro, Marcel Desially and Lilian Thuram spring to mind.
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Besides, your full-backs should be the better ball players anyway. They make the pitch bigger by hogging the touchlines and are therefore always an outlet ball; they bomb forward to join in attack and can provide crosses for their forwards to attack.
Centre-backs? You are meant to just stand there, mop up the danger and give it to midfielders infinitely better at starting attacks than you are. Who do you think you are, anyway?
Well, Tottenham Hotspur’s Toby Alderweireld clearly has other ideas.
The 60-yard diagonal ball he sprayed from right to left to pick out the perfectly timed run of Dele Alli for Spurs’s equaliser against Everton on Sunday was inch perfect, although it would be remiss not to acknowledge that the young midfielder still had plenty of work to do to control and execute a brilliant finish.
The same combination worked superbly to score against West Bromwich Albion during last month’s 1-1 draw at The Hawthorns, too. Alderweireld received the ball just inside his own half, spotted Alli’s arcing run inside the right-back into the West Brom area and sent a missile that dissected one of the most organised backlines in the Premier League.
Make no mistake, these were no “hit and hope” passes, a defender panicked in possession launching the ball wildly upfield. These were guided missiles launched with pinpoint accuracy to pick out the run of a midfielder who is showing a football intelligence well beyond his 19 years.
Nothing kills a defence like a ball in behind them. If it so happens to come from the foot of a humble centre-back, maybe it is time to consign those brutal, uncompromising types to the history books after all.
Rooney engages his brain
This week’s doff of the hat must go to Wayne Rooney for a finish against Swansea City so exquisite it makes you wonder how we could ever have doubted the Manchester United captain’s place in the team.
Anthony Martial’s ball into Rooney in the penalty area was drilled with such pace that Rooney would only have had a nano second to process that he had overshot the pass and needed recalculate how he would connect with the ball. Rooney improvised superbly to guide the ball beyond Lukas Fabianski’s far post using the instep of his left-heel.
It is not often Rooney’s or a footballer’s intelligence is the focus of an intellectual discussion, but the motor neuron skills used to make split-second decisions to such devastating effect is rarely appreciated.
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