GOT THIS FROM WIKIPEDIA.... Are we playing total football? U TELL ME?
In football (soccer), Total Football is a system where a player who moves out of his position is replaced by another from his team, thus retaining their intended organisational structure. In this fluid system no footballer is fixed in their intended outfield role; anyone can be successively an attacker, a midfielder and a defender. Total Football depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team to succeed.
The foundations for Total Football were laid by Jack Reynolds, who was the manager of Ajax for 33 years in the early 20th century. Rinus Michels, who played under Reynolds, later went on to become manager of Ajax himself and refined the concept into what today is known as "Total Football", using it in his training for the Ajax Amsterdam squad and the Netherlands national team in the 1970s. The term Total Football is also used to describe the effective, dominating play of West German football in the 1970s. The ill-fated Austrian "Wunderteam" of the 1930s is also credited in some circles as being the first national team to play Total Football.
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ON THE OTHER SIDE IS THIS PHILOSOPHY WHICH IS WHAT MOURINHO EMPLOYS OCCASIONALLY AT CHELSEA.
Catenaccio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Catenaccio describes a tactical system in football with an emphasis on defence and tactical fouls. In Italian catenaccio means "door-bolt" and it effectively means a highly organized backline defense which is intended to prevent goals. It was made famous by Argentinian trainer Helenio Herrera of Inter Milan in the 1960s who used it to grind out 1-0 wins over opponents in their league games.
Catenaccio could have originated from the verrou or "chain" system invented by Austrian coach Karl Rappan. As coach of Switzerland, Rappan played a defensive sweeper just ahead of his goalkeeper in the 1930s and 1940s. Nereo Rocco's Padua team pioneered the system in Italy in the 1950s where it would be used again by the AC Milan team of the early 1960s.
In Herrera's version in the 1960s, four man-marking defenders are tightly assigned to each opposing attacker while an extra sweeper would pick up any loose ball that escaped the marking of the defenders.
The catenaccio system is often criticized for reducing the quality of football games as a spectacle. In certain parts of Europe it became synonymous with negative football since the attacking aspect of the game is neglected.