Flair is Dead... Long Live Flair!
Eddie's system did for Arsenal, but what place individual brilliance in the modern world of systems football? Rob McGregor chews the fat.
Tell me Ma, me Ma; whatever will be will be; we’re going to Wembley, tell me Ma, me Ma! Lovely stuff. A second visit to ‘the home of football’ in the space of three seasons. A person could get used to this.
That defeat of Arsenal was a tactical masterclass from Eddie Howe to nullify one of the best teams in the country - hilariously perfected in the space of just three training sessions in the build up to the second leg - and the roar of St. James’ Park, so vibrant that it rendered Jamie Redknapp unable to hear Sky Sports’ host Mark Chapman’s question at the final whistle. A night to remember.
The 5-4-1, briefly deployed at Old Trafford earlier in the season but only really fully used in anger on Wednesday, represented a big shift away from the 4-3-3 which Howe has, at times almost rigidly, utilised. It also represented a not so modern, but increasingly pertinent part of the game: the system.
Does the “system” work? What makes the “system” work? How and when does a team change its “system”? Do the players suit the “system”? And on and on the questions go, until you’ve started to spell it “cistern” and rolled your eyes so far back into your head that you can see your own brain.
There is, clearly, a time and a place for tactical discipline - compacting the space, zonal marking of the inverted winger, deploying a high line byline in line with the touchline.Tactics and systems have existed since football formed itself into what we still see today. Eleven versus eleven, ‘fixed’ dimensions of a pitch (give or take a few meters here and there). Read Jonathan Wilson’s excellent ‘Inverting the Pyramid’ for more on this sort of thing.
But for all the nights where we celebrate the centre back stepping into midfield, where we debate the merits of a double pivot, or ask whether a lone striker can evade three centre backs, I’d also like a little bit less of that sort of thing a lot more often these days, because I think the game has lost a little bit of its spark in the wake of systems football.
It’s lost some of its flair.
Perhaps there is an element of nostalgia to all this. And it should go without saying that a person can respect the deployment of the 5-4-1 in order to win a Cup semi-final, and in turn perhaps end a club’s 70-year trophy drought, but also long for something a little bit more ‘free form’. To miss the mercurial talents of Ben Arfa, Ginola, or Saint-Maximin, whilst appreciating the fact Newcastle has its best striker since Shearer, and arguably the most complete midfielder in the club’s history operating within a framework that, mostly, just works because of its machine like qualities and use of players as cogs. We humans are complex, and two things can be true at the same time.
This isn’t just a Newcastle thing either. It’s a football thing. Following Monday night’s game between Chelsea and West Ham, Sky Sports spent time with Gianfranco Zola. The diminutive Italian grew up playing alongside Maradona at Napoli, and won a UEFA Cup with Parma, before moving to the Premier League. Asked whether he thought today’s game had the same ‘players you’d pay to see’ as previous generations did, Zola simply said ‘no’.
The rise of academies was cited by Zola as a possible cause - clubs pulling kids into their ecosphere at younger and younger ages, with fewer skills (both physical and mental) learnt by playing on the streets, or in less rigid junior club systems. An element of innovation has gone. The mavericks of old have died out, or have become so ingrained in a system that the individualism has been sanded down significantly. ‘This is how we play as a team’.
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that this is where we’ve ended up. Football is, figuratively and literally, a results business. Success on the pitch keeps people in jobs, and bolsters the club’s bottom line. A functional, coherent system also comes with the considerable benefit of being able to do ‘more, with less’ - Eddie Howe’s tenure at St. James’ Park is proof of this, given a considerable number of the current first team squad were also around during the latter days of Bruce and Ashley, but with wildly different performances and results.
In Italy, Antonio Conte’s Napoli sit at the top of Serie A (at the time of writing). Victor Osimhen’s absence is barely a footnote at this point; while Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s departure for Paris last month came with what amounted to a shrug and a ‘thanks for the £60 million’ from Napoli fans. Eighteen months ago, it was unthinkable that Napoli could function without them. But now the system prevails. Clubs can move on because they play this way, and the coach will simply plug in the next player who shows enough of the right attributes to play a role.
It can go the other way of course. Few will weep for Manchester City’s relative collapse this season; the ‘ultimate systems team’ have come undone by the bit where they suddenly cannot make Pep Guardiola’s system work, seemingly due to one cog being taken out of the machine. Might as well give Rodri this year’s Ballon d’Or too, so significant has his absence been.
The technical brilliance City possess on paper is what has made their difficulties this season so shocking, but then, that is the modern game. They want to play a certain way, follow certain patterns, but then when it doesn’t work the club which sandpapered away Jack Grealish’s and Jeremy Doku’s rough edges are stunned that neither shows the same verve they did at Aston Villa and Rennes respectively when the club needs to climb out of a hole.
A loss of individualism writ large.
After such a barren spell, few in or around St. James’ Park will care I am sure. I’ll admit, slightly hypocritically, I’m not sure I do when it comes to Newcastle United right now (again, we humans are complicated). That long awaited silverware means most of us would settle for a series of rigid 1-0 wins if it meant finally, finally getting to taste success again. At least in the short term. But at some point a sport which asks us to pay increasing amounts to help prop it up needs to give a little back.
Because it is a sport. It’s supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be entertaining. And Hatem Ben Arfa’s goal against Bolton is infinitely more fun and entertaining than talking about whether we should invert the wing backs next weekend.
Rob McGregor @samuraipizzarob.bsky.social
(Image: Hatem Ben Arfa by Gil Zetbase, under CC 4.0 licence)
Great piece, Rob. I wonder if we're also witnessing the "death" of the no. 10 - maverick or otherwise. No place for one of those in Eddie's system, and it's getting harder and harder to think of examples of those teams that do.
I guess there might be a counter-reaction in time. You'd think flair might be increasingly needed to break down all these systems. Let's see.
Excellent article. I refer to the situation as few teams now have “disrupters”, players who can actually run at and past players, pulling a teams’ formation out of shape.