1
GRIEZMANN SPOILS
THE IBIZA PARTY
The party island of Ibiza made
the most of its team UD Ibiza’s first-ever
competitive match against Barcelona.
The two sides were drawn together in
the Copa del Rey, the first season that
UD Ibiza had entered the competition.
The club, only formed in 2015,
hired one of the island’s top DJs, Manu
Gonzalez, to “provide the pre-match and
half-time beats”, and it nearly inspired an
almighty shock as the islanders took a
ninth-minute lead through Javi Perez.
They held on until the 72nd minute,
when Antoine Griezmann equalised for
the Spanish champions. He then added
a second, deep into added time, to break
Ibiza hearts.2
WHO YA GONNA CALL?
The unlikely appointment of
English management duo
Alan Pardew and Chris Powell was
greeted at their first game in charge
of Eredivisie strugglers Den Haag with
a giant Ghostbusters banner in the
home fans’ end.
The word “degradatiespook” was visible
across the banner which when translated
means “‘relegation ghost” and the local
supporters clearly hope that the pair can
inspire their team to avoid the drop.
Pardew and Powell began well with
a 2-0 win over RKC Waalwijk but a 4-
loss at Utrecht and a home draw with
Vitesse left them three points adrift of
the play-off spot.3
DE ROSSI IS MADE UP
TO WATCH ROMA
Former Roma captain Daniele
De Rossi, who announced his playing
retirement in January, wore a disguise
of fake nose and glasses in order to
watch the recent derby game against
Lazio from the Curva Sud section of the
Stadio Olimpico.
Born and raised in the city’s working-
class suburb of Ostia, when he left his
home-town club last year the midfielder
said he would find a way to return and
watch his old team “with a beer and a
sandwich to cheer on my friends”.
The 36-year-old’s wife, Sarah
Felberbaum, revealed De Rossi’s make-up
job on Instagram, explaining: “We lost an
entire afternoon, hours of make-up and
traumatised children, but he was happy
like a little kid.”4
CUP PRANK PAYS
OFF FOR JASON
Shrewsbury Town of the third
tier in English football welcomed the
Sky Sports cameras down to their
training ground ahead of their FA Cup
fourth round tie at home to Champions
League winners and Premier League
champions-elect Liverpool.
And forward Jason Cummings
thought it would be fun to strip down
to his underpants and play the clown
while team-mate David Edwards was
being interviewed.
Four days later, however, Cummings
was the hero as he scored twice in the
second-half to earn the Shrews a money-
spinning replay at Anfield.REPORTS WE COULDN’T MAKE UP
Attention seekers
...Jason Cummings
(right) and Den
Haag fans (below)Double...Antoine
Griezmann (right)GLOBAL FOOTBALL INTELLIGENCE
to third place in the Bundesliga in 1995,
but their financial status meant they
couldn’t sustain that position, and as
they fell back it allowed a complacent
establishment to believe football was still
about the traditional values of leadership
and winning individual battles.
Change, though, was coming, and
pressing reached its peak in Klopp,
who was introduced to the concept
by Wolfgang Frank at Mainz.
Frank had been a forward for Eintracht
Braunschweig but he was one of a
growing band of German coaches
obsessed by Sacchi. When Frank was
appointed, Mainz were bottom of the
German second tier with one point and
no goals in eight games. They stayed up
that season, though, and the following
year finished fourth.
Once pressing had been accepted,
Germany took to it with a convert’s zeal.
Rangnick had been broadly dismissed as
an over-intellectualising crank when he
had appeared on German television in
the late 1990s to explain the concept
of zonal marking that underpins most
pressing, but Klopp’s punditry on the
2006 World Cup made such ideas
mainstream. The Bundesliga now feels
like the world centre of pressing, both
through coaches still working in Germany
- Julian Nagelsmann, Marco Rose and
Lucien Favre – and those who have left,
particularly for England – Klopp, Ralph
Hasenhuttl, Daniel Farke, David Wagner.
Not that the return to an aggressive,
percussive game has been universally
welcomed in the game.
“We have progressively taken the NBA
route, that of a very ‘athleticised’ sport,”
Arsene Wenger said recently. “Today, like
basketball, certain creative players are
being eliminated, under the simple
pretext that they are not athletic enough.
“In time, the danger, for me, is that
football develops into a sport where
players run like crazy people to win the
ball back as quickly as possible, but who
don’t know what to do when they actually
have it in their possession.”
That he should invoke the basketball
comparison in precisely the opposite
way to how it was used a decade ago,
perhaps, is revealing. Football follows a
path until it reaches an extreme at which
it begins to resemble something that is
not football, at which point an antithetical
reaction drives it back. That’s how
dialectical development works.