After a not entirely unexpected drubbing by Napoli, CBS’s post-match analysis was something I genuinely wanted to flick on. Perhaps more so because I am largely removed from the footballing community nowadays, I had nonetheless taken stock of the Carraghers and the Nevilles of the world upping their game when it comes to looking at football.
After years of battling for legitimacy, a more granular look at football is now well-established. With Twitter, substack, and various other mediums serving as a means to elucidate those who were reluctant to hop on pre-2020, I wondered if the kind of analysis I yearned for when I started writing about football had gone entirely mainstream. I’d seen xG on the BBC, ‘tactical analysis’ isn’t just a phrase that sends Miguel Delaney into a furor, and the recognition of analytics departments in recent football successes does not go quietly- I figured CBS’s post-match show would satisfy.
Though I can’t say what followed was entirely terrible, it was more a smoothie of what I wanted and expected. There were some genuinely solid points about high lines, how Liverpool use theirs, and how Napoli might have exploited it, but it didn’t go much deeper than ‘there’s a high line and no pressure.’ The conversation then meandered off into an intangible-esque conversation about Liverpool being a team that has gone ‘full-pelt’ for 6-7 years under Klopp. Suggesting their movement or lack thereof in the transfer market underestimated how old the squad is. While I don’t think that’s necessarily an invalid point, it did bug me that they gave me the potatoes and gravy but held off on the meat when it came to the actual analysis of the game.
The problem they looked to analyze directly could have been more succinctly covered with just a few more sentences— no extra segment or hour-long whiteboard description needed. Carragher mentions and illustrates the existence of the Liverpool high line, pinpoints Gomez slowing as the Napoli striker breaks the line, and singles him out as the issue in that sequence- suggesting that you can’t stop when there’s no pressure on the ball. Now, Carragher is correct. If you’re playing a high line and there’s no pressure on the ball, you can’t switch off and let the run of an adjacent attacker get out of reach- but why?
The advantage that Liverpool and many other teams have reaped from playing a high line has been discussed ad nauseam, but we’ll do so again. A pressing action is an inherently risky maneuver because it makes a defensive shape less compact. A lack of compactness means more space for attackers to play in and move through, which generally equates to goals being scored. The way you hedge your pressing bet is by making the space you need to cover when you want to press smaller. The dimensions of the pitch certainly aren’t going to do that, so you make the Effective Pitch (what is playable space) smaller by playing a high line. This makes the pressing area smaller, and as long as you have pressure on the ball while the high line is held, you technically don’t have to worry about a ball over the top exposing the amount of space between the line and the keeper.
Walking the line between actively pressing and having your backline switched on to holding or tracking the runs is a delicate dance. When executed well, you get peak Liverpool and Manchester City. They don’t just control the game on the ball; they control it all the time. They control space and time. But, that can rupture. Without diving too deep, Napoli seemed to jump on the lack of connection present in the Liverpool team by disguising some of the passes that ‘break’ the necessary space-time continuum of a well-coordinated high line.
Case in point; there’s no pressure on the initial ball carrier here due to a moment of transition, and maybe because they can see the pass going backward, so no immediate danger is perceived. But, Anguissa immediately hits it one touch over the top, and they’re off to the races. Liverpool are in a moment where the pressure of the season has made it such that they don’t ever want to be defending, so they’re making an already high-risk defensive strategy, even more so by lacking in the execution of its fundamentals. Most of the other incidents in this game are a result of individual errors or brilliance on either side, but if they’re going to get better moving forward, it lies in fixing what they were once so good at.
Obviously, you don’t need to say all that to elucidate the point about the high line, but educating viewers on the ‘why’ of a tactic is no more complicated than saying, ‘why you play a high line is to make the pitch smaller and the press more effective. Liverpool aren’t doing that.’ Add a lovely Scouse accent into the mix, and you’ve got a multi-million dollar tv segment.
Would love to hear what you think about this concept of comfortably embracing vague cliches or slogans instead of diving into meat and potatoes analysis, when it comes to politics and how the average American interacts with this phenomenon.