Holding Midfield
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Total Football might well have been the worst thing to have happened to Dutch football. The greatness of Rinus Michel’s creation hung a weight around the necks of the generations that followed. Having experienced the teams of the seventies, those that followed not only had to win, but do so in style. With the eyes (and more importantly massive mouth) of Johan Cruyff watching over them, it has written a cheque most Dutch teams haven’t been able to cash. They weren’t half good though. The homogeneous style now wanted by the likes of Cruyff was born out of Dutch football being a blank canvas. As the boom of professionalism emerged in the mid-fifties the Dutch were still using the 2-3-5 formation rather than the W-M with its rigid man-to-man marking, which allowed for the ideas of pressing to blossom: it was easier to think about space rather than just 11 battles over the pitch when not every man had a direct opponent to mark, and the increased fitness professionalism brings made chasing around to win the ball back a viable option. However, what they did when they got the ball was something an Englishman taught them. Jack Reynolds became Ajax [...]
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