D uring the World Cup last year, the thriller writer Jeremy Duns, who by his own admission is not much of a football fan, asked why so many goalkeepers tended to punt the ball long down the pitch, which meant possession was lost more than half the time. It is one of those questions that seems at first sight naive but that, once you try to answer it, makes you interrogate a lot of basic assumptions about the game.
Goalkeepers kick it long because, well, why? You try to formulate an answer: to get the ball away from their goal and nearer the opponent’s goal. But then you imagine @jeremyduns’s scorn – and given he is a notoriously tenacious Twitter combatant, imagined conversations with him are a good way of testing any theory. Given there is a (significantly) greater than 50% chance of possession being lost, that means the keeper is giving away the ball, the thing you need if you are going to score. Doesn’t that simply gift the initiative to the opposition?
Ah, but second balls. It is not about winning that first header after the clearance; it is about picking up the loose ball.
So in a game in which millions of pounds are spent every transfer window on signing players, in which the annual wage bill in the Premier League alone is almost £3bn, the preferred method of restarting the game is to boot the ball into space, having two players challenge for it in such a way that there is a tiny chance the one on your side will be able to take a controlled touch, and then hoping the random bounce from that challenge will fall your way?
Put like that, it seems bizarre. Of course, it is an oversimplification. The best sides will seek to play out from the back, will look to protect possession. In the World Cup, where teams are generally of lower quality and have far less time together to develop the sort of practised cohesion that has come to characterise the best club sides, there are more hopeful punts than in, say, the Premier League or Champions League.
And there have been teams who have used the directed long ball effectively, from Dave Beasant’s enormous kicks towards John Fashanu for Wimbledon to Egil Olsen’s Norway playing into the space behind the opposing defence, to Ederson’s accurate long passes out to the wing to bypass an opposition press for the modern Manchester City.
Perhaps for younger generations – those brought up on Fifa or ProEvo, in which a player’s touch can be taken for granted and squandering possession is very clearly counterproductive – the paradigm is shifting. But still there lingers a sense, whether playing or watching, that the long clearance from the keeper is the default and that a short pass out to a defender is somehow a risky deviation from the norm.
The reason lies in the evolution of the game. In its origins, football was about dribbling. Individuals would run with the ball, with teammates backing them up to try to regain possession after a challenge. It was about driving the opposition back. It seems likely, although the evidence isn’t entirely clear, that there would be the occasional long kick for position but it wasn’t until 1872 and the first international that passing as a systematic policy was devised, as Scotland sought to find a way to deal with the fact that England’s players were significantly bigger and heavier than them. Even then, there was scepticism about passing in England until a series of defeats to Scotland persuaded them that passing was perhaps the future.
Yet still a deep-rooted memory of the game’s origins remains. For all the game’s recent tactical developments, its jargon seems rooted in territorial warfare: “aerial bombardment”, “laid siege to their goal”, “a forward sally”, “an attritional battle”, “bogged down in midfield” – it is the language of the trenches. And that perhaps reinforces, if only subconsciously, the sense that football is a territorial game.
And that once made sense. There was a time, when boots were heavy, balls soaked up water, technique was poorer, goalkeepers often seemed like bystanders and pitches were mudbaths, when playing for territory was the reasonable thing to do. Why would you want the ball near your own goal when the possibility of something going wrong was so high?
Yet even in the relatively early days there were visionaries. Herbert Chapman pioneered counterattacking even during his time at Northampton, taking it to new heights at Huddersfield and then, after the change to the offside law in 1925, at Arsenal, as he oversaw the development of the W-M formation. That was the origin of the “lucky Arsenal” jibe as others struggled to understand how a team that spent so much time in their own half could win so frequently.
Charles Reep, the former RAF officer who pioneered statistical analysis of football in Britain in the 60s and 70s, showed that if a team had the ball in their defensive third, they were far more likely to concede than score (and while much of his reasoning was flawed, there is no reason to doubt his figures), adding statistical heft.
One of the problems with Reep’s work is that it makes no allowance for quality: what is good for the average side isn’t necessarily good for the very best. In the half century or so since, pitches, balls and kit have become better, and so too has the basic technique of players as a whole. The clogger doesn’t really exist in the Premier League any more. Tactical awareness and work on shape has become more and more sophisticated. There are still those like José Mourinho who preach the doctrine of fear but position for managers such as Pep Guardiola means less where the ball is on the pitch than where the players are in relation to each other.
And as football has become more about possession and less about territory, the goalkeeper’s long punt downfield, at elite level at least, increasingly seems an anachronism, a vestige of what the game used to be.