Very interesting excerpt from Unai Emery's (who is very Pep like in his philosophy and has only good words to speak about him) interview with Marti Perarnau:
Let’s talk about the defensive midfielder, an essential element to a team. Why has this position been a weak spot for PSG this season? You have tried playing with Motta, Lo Celso, Rabiot, Verratti, Lassana Diarra…
It depends… I remember when I would analyse Real Madrid, I thought that Xabi Alonso suffered from not having to run track back and that he was the weak link. When I would analysed Barcelona and saw Busquets, I thought that Sergio suffered from the space left behind him. I thought the same with Thiago Motta. All the great defensive midfielders suffer from a lack of space behind them, and when they are required to track back. But when a team has the ball 70% of the time, that is more important than knowing if you’ll struggle when tracking back. You are the one dominating the matches. That’s why your defensive midfielder’s output during moments where you don’t have the ball is less important.
Because those periods don’t last as long. If I were to put a destroyer at defensive midfielder, there’s a significant trade off between what I can do during build-up play, rather than what I can do in defensive situations. Of course, Thiago Motta needs to better without the ball. But if you analyse Xabi Alonso or Sergio Busquets, the same could be said for them. They struggle during those periods, but they contribute so much more while on the ball. I don’t think this position was a weakness for PSG.
Motta is an incredible defensive midfielder. His injuries were the problem this year. Motta brought a lot to the team and his contribution on the ball was significant. He had difficult tracking back? Fine, but so do two other European champions Xabi and Busquets, who possess the same characteristics as Thiago. I don’t think PSG’s problem was the defensive midfielder.
Let’s talk about Rabiot. He’s a central midfielder, who is more comfortable playing as a defensive midfielder rather than a creative one. Even if he remains more of box-to-box, rather than a defensive midfielder. When you want to play with a defensive, creative and box-to-box-midfielders in fixed positions, Rabiot finds himself confronted to a problem. He has to run, run, run and not play in a fixed position statically. And even less so with his back turned on the action.
Rabiot doesn’t really like playing as a defensive midfielder, he likes playing as a box-to-box, but I prefer him as a defensive midfielder. That’s why after the elimination against Real Madrid, I told him he would play as a defensive midfielder.
In that position, he can be faced with play and switch around with Verratti. He is more competitive in these conditions. With certain players, you can’t impose a strict idea. You have to adapt yourself to their characteristics in order to win in individual and collective competitiveness. Lassana Diarra? He arrived in early January, after having played for six months in a low level league, and he needed time to accustom himself to the high level.
Pep told me something fundamental last year. To win the Champions’ League, Barca had to go through two crucial moments in their history. Bakero’s goal against Kaiserslautern (goal in 1991 which prevented Barcelona’s Champions League elimination which they would win a few months later) and Iniesta’s goal against Chelsea. PSG are missing a goal like that!
This goal could have maybe come about last year when we lost 6-1 to Barcelona. Maybe that was the moment to hit the ceiling and reach the next stage. Or this year, with Real Madrid. PSG is missing that match, that moment to build upon. Having a “Bakero goal.” Even if the opposition were inferior or didn’t deserve to win. But that “bam!” moment, where you score your goal and change your destiny.
To become a great team, everyone has to go through this. The only team who doesn’t need it because they’ve lived enough experiences like this is Real Madrid. This year, we went through a moment where everything could shift. It was at the Bernabeu where Real struggled. We could see it. We even spoke before the match, “Real has to struggle to lose.” Our objective was to make them struggle and for them to not come out alive from that moment. Giving them a fatal hit at the time when they were in most difficulty. We had the opportunity to so in the second half at 1-1. At that point in time, I was calm, because the victory seemed feasible.
Yet, and we spoke about this before, you have to be careful about the beginning and end of the halves with Real, because that’s when the time where they wake up. And for the match, what we hoped wouldn’t happen, did happen. At the end of the first half we conceded a penalty and they equalised. During the second half, we didn’t take advantage of our best period. At the end of the match, they took advantage of that and doubled the score-line. We weren’t able to finish our chances when they were available and we didn’t suffer properly when we should have. If they score the goal for 2-1, you have to suffer until the end, hang in there, grasping, suffering, suffering, resisting and doing your best to make sure the score remains the same.
Of course, the second leg was a whole story because Real came to our stadium in very favourable conditions. We needed the match to be crazy, but we didn’t manage. Maybe because I started players who would help us control play, instead of accelerate the rhythm of the match. At that point, I didn’t have control of the team. I put players to control those tense moments, but the match required something else.
As early as the 15th minute, I told my assistant Carcedo that it wouldn’t be enough. For that match against Real, we needed the same excitement as last year – we needed to break everything. And with that excitement, Real would get scared. We managed to get that feeling at times in the Bernabeu, but not for the second leg.
Full link to the interview:
http://www.getfootballnewsfrance.co...ces-real-masterpieces-and-making-them-my-own/
It's an excellent read and insight into how a manager thinks tactically. Also perhaps the above excerpt gives some directions on how we should be thinking about Jorginho, in particular, his perceived inability to cover the ground as much as Fernandinho.
