Tactical stalemate at Euro Championships

Croatia are everyone’s second team at Euro because of their style. PHOTO BY AFP

What you need to know:

CODE BREAKER. While at Inter Milan, Jose Mourinho showed that with enough discipline the famous tiki-taka style of play had more than one weakness.

Barcelona and by extension Spain’s domination of football over the last decade has been so striking that it has defined the tactical direction of the global game.
It became fashionable for tacticians to preach fluidity in passing and ball retention. Without the ball, your opponent was harmless. And for long this philosophy bore fruit as is evident in the massive haul of trophies that both Spain and Barcelona have won.
But just as it is in all competition, the logic of football is that a dominant philosophy inevitably gives birth to an antidote.

While it is rare that you can pinpoint the precise moment at which the world changed, for Europe it must have come on 28 April 2010 with Barcelona’s elimination by Jose Mourinho’s Inter Milan in the Uefa Champions League semi-finals.
This was the moment Inter Milan revealed to us that the all-conquering tiki-taka had a weakness. With enough discipline, one could actually concede possession, soak up pressure and hit on the counter. And Inter Milan did it and for over an hour, with a man less, too.

This game persuaded tacticians to tear up the old blueprints and start again. In any case, containing was much easier taught than the technical subtlety of possession football.
Teams have since adapted this putting of men behind the ball, with increasing rates of success. It was also a lifeline for those that saw themselves as lacking in the finesse of Barcelona. And this grew way up into national team psyche.
So what we are seeing at the Euros is a fine mix of possession football and the latter day template of that Inter Milan defensive tactical masterclass. Spain will be Spain, but Croatia will not wilt before them completely.

We are basically standing at the break-even point of opposing philosophies - tiki taka and ‘parking of the bus’! And this explains why most of the games at Euro 2016 so far have been near stalemates, with most goals scored towards the end of either half - a time when most teams are starting to shut down mentally.
And if Barcelona had won on that night against Inter Milan, this sparring of opposing philosophies, this Euro 2016 could have been a whole lot different. A lot drawn between Germany and Spain for the winner could just have served as well.

Thankfully, that’s not the case because Europe is playing off this tactical stalemate. So we should neither be shocked by the absence of big score lines, nor by the qualification of Wales Iceland and the Irelands, into the round of 16. And Leicester’s Premier League triumph isn’t that shocking now. Is it?
Therefore, for me the team that will win Euro 2016 won’t be one with the best pass-completion statistics like Spain, or the best defense like Italy for that matter. It shall be one that manages to balance the finesse of possession football, with the stamina to exploit that lapse in concentration that comes after minutes of dogged defending. And my money is on Croatia.