“Some teams can’t or don’t pass the ball. What are you playing for? What’s the point? That’s not football. Combine, pass, play. That’s football.– Xavi Hernández
On we go explaining yet another style of play within this glorious game. Today is a special one as this system was the one played by a certain team that many called the greatest club team in football history. Can you guess which team that is? The answer will be coming up within the next few passages….
T.T.M and Short is the epitome of the term ‘possession football’, as the sole aim of this system is to dominate the ball for as long as possible in order to confuse and tire out opponents with “tiki-taka” style of passing. Although the players you decide to use to play this system are important, what’s even more important is how you use these options below:
Let’s start off with the tempo you will play. Although it is possible to play a fast tempo with a short passing style, when you decide to attack Through the Middle your team’s ability to pass the ball at a high speed will be limited. Therefore, the result will be that the tempo is slower thus making it more effective for this pattern of play to be implemented even better.
Now, even more important than your tempo is the boxes you decide to tick off and leave unticked. Most managers will want to implement a high press when playing this system as the players at your disposal are going be shorter in stature therefore they lack the physical requirements needed to defend in a mid-block or low-block (pressing in own half and own area, respectively). So, the high press should be used, but when you press all over you don’t tick the Men Behind Ball box, right? Normally, you wouldn’t, but when it comes to T.T.M and Short, the M.B.B box is mandatory. Why? Because short passing generally requires your players to be within close proximity to one another ( check out Season 2: Episode 2: Team instructions for a more detailed explanation of short passing within SM). Therefore, you must tick that box and keep it ticked throughout the entirety of a match as leaving it unticked will cause your players to be too far from each other which will then force them to play more direct passes, completley negating the effectiveness of passing short.
Lastly, before we get into the illustrations , the type of players you will need for this pattern of play must be a 25 man squad with incredible technical ability, period. They’ll be no counter attacking, explosive dribbling, or 1v1s (except for when looking to slow the game down further) within this system as its all about creating triangles on the pitch via intricate passing and movement. They’ll also not be a host of running off the ball (except for your ‘Fullbacks’/ ‘Wingbacks’) as the main source of movement will be going a few meters in order to collect the ball or pull the opponents out of position.
Sooo, did you figure out which team I was talking about earlier? If you did, then kudos to you. If you didn’t, shame on you (just kidding… well, not really)! The team is indeed the infamous Barcelona team from 2007-2012. Arguably, they are considered the greatest club side to ever play football and their style was all about “killing their opposition to death” with possession based passing, intricate movement, and amazing speed of thought within the final third, and they accomplished all of this while keeping the ball on the deck 95% of the time during their matches.
We will be illustrating a match from the 2010/11 season when they came up against Real Betis at Camp Nou (This was also the match where Barca performed a pre game celebration for Messi, Iniesta, and Xavi for being voted the top 3 players of the 2010 Balon D’or).
And just like that, we’ve completed yet another episode of diving into various patterns of play. The ball is in our court so look forward for the next episode pretty shortly, Soccermanagerites. Till next time!
The Soccermanager Experience 