gregorrin10
Senior Member
I think there is a general misconception of what attacking football is. Attacking football does not mean tiki taka, those are 2 different things. I dont know anyone who would not enjoy attacking football among my friends (who are fans of various clubs), but i know alot of people who consider tiki-taka extremely boring, not to mention not that efficient those days. Football evolves constantly.
I have an issue with being possession possessed. If you look at teams who have won CL in recent years, Liverpool, Real etc, none of the clubs care about possession, but they are all attacking teams. Klopp can easily allow his team sit in defense, but once they get the ball (which they often do due to excellent pressing), they are like chasing dogs after rabbit. I have stated this before and i am stating it now as well. Luchos treble winning side was for me the most enjoyable football Barcelona has played, not Peps Barca. Because they were direct, hungry, packed with speed and lots of skill and with only 1 goal, to score and win games. They are not afraid to shoot the ball from distance, they are very quick in transition from defense to attack if needed and they dont necessarily need to walk the ball into goal. What you need for this to actually execute though, is correct combination of youth and experience and technical and fast players. All those teams i previously mentioned had the same quality.
Klopps team has attack trio in their prime years (25-28), who are all gifted technically but also fast and great on ball. Very similar to what Luchos Barca had in MSN, then mixed energy and technical ability in midfield and endlessly energic full-backs, packed with strong defenders, who could pass the ball under pressure.
Now lets look at our squad. Only forward we have who would somewhat go under this category is Griez, rest are too young and unexperienced (Fati, Dembele, Perez) or too old (Messi, Suarez). 4 out of our 6 midfielders are 31-32 and probably not capable of pressing entire game and then we have Arthur who obviously has some fitness health issues and De Jong, who seems to be overplayed, etc. I do not see how we can expect glorious things from this squad unless a dramatic reshape is done, lets hope Setien is the guy who can deliver it.
I also don't necessarily associate playing attacking football with tiki-taka especially if it's like we played under Tata or even Tito, where the primary object was to keep the ball but doing nothing meaningful with it. I also consider Liverpool to be playing nice football, even though they're not obsessed with possession. But the way the press when the ball is lost, they aim to get the ball back right away, it automatically gives you the majority of possession, I remember just the other day, when I was watching one of their games and they had like 80% possession without even focusing on that, but every and all the time, when they had the ball, they were dangerous to score. So yes, it's about possession, but it's more about that being the consequence of good pressing, even gegen-press style which allows you to not give your opponent room to breathe and to keep the ball for longer than a few seconds. And offensively, it's about looking and thinking forward, always be on the lookout for that killer pass or shot, not aimlessly keeping the ball for the sake of possession. And we certainly never did that under Pep, we were very direct right after we got the ball back, even though you say you didn't like our style then as much as you did Lucho, when we were basically more of a counter attacking team. Like under Pep, like Liverpool now, high possession was/is a by product of doing everything else right, being direct and effective with the ball and being relentless off it.
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