Team Focus: Stopping Swansea's build-up play at source

Marcelo Bielsa spends hours watching videos of football. When he was appointed manager of Velez Sarsfield in 1997, he made only one demand: that a television and video recorder be installed in his office. He was asked once what he had planned for Christmas: he was going back to his parents’ house in Rosario, he said, where he would do two hours of physical exercise every day and 14 hours of watching videos of football. The journalist did a quick calculation and said, “Nine games a day?” No, Bielsa replied: 18; he’d developed a way of watching two matches simultaneously.

The reason – and the reason he could watch two games at once – was that he was looking for patterns, the internal mechanisms by which opponents worked, trying to work out how best his team could win the ball back from the opposition, how best to disrupt their play. That, really, is the essence of a sophisticated pressing game, focusing the press so it’s about more than just the expenditure of energy.

With passing teams, breaking up those natural patterns can be especially effective. A lot of the time players will barely be aware of where they look to pass. The centre-back will receive the ball and, for instance, will instinctively look to play it to the right-back, who finds time again that he ends up laying it down the line for the right-sided midfielder. Cut out that space between centre-back and full-back and suddenly the centre-back finds himself having to think about what he’s going to do with the ball and that in turn spreads doubt.

Swansea’s defenders are all comfortable on the ball – it’s one of their defining qualities as a team – but the last three games have still been instructive. They came up against a Sunderland team that sat back and looked to frustrate them – and won 4-0. Then they played West Ham and Cardiff, teams who pressed to a greater extent, drawing the former game 0-0 and losing the second 1-0.

Over the course of the season, Michel Vorm has distributed to a centre-back 53.4% of the time, to the deepest midfielder 9%, to the right-back 9.6% and to the left-back 6.4%. Against Sunderland – although he had so little of the ball in that game he distributed only 11 times so the sample size is very small – Vorm played it to a centre-back 63.6%, to the left-back 18% and not at all to the right-back.

West Ham, though, by closing the central defenders quickly, ensured Vorm distributed to them only 47.6% of the time, a slight drop off that meant Vorm went more to his right-back, Angel Rangel, who received the ball from him 19.0% of the time. By putting him under pressure, with first Ricardo Vaz Te and then Matt Jarvis moving to close him down, West Ham brought down Rangel’s passing accuracy from 88% against Sunderland to 81%.

Those might not sound like huge numbers but everything has a knock-on effect: Rangel was getting the ball from his keeper twice as often as he usually did and he was misplacing his passes more frequently. It’s likely given that drop off that the passes he was completing weren’t as well-weighted or well-conceived as usual. Extrapolate that and it’s easy to see why Swansea never found their usual fluency against West Ham.

Cardiff seemed to pursue a similar policy. They were happy to let Vorm distribute to the central defenders – they received it from him 71% of the time – but Craig Bellamy and Don Cowie immediately put pressure on the full-backs. Bellamy made 3 tackles and 1 interception and Cowie 2 interceptions and 1 tackle, pushing Rangel’s pass accuracy down to 82% and Neil Taylor’s to 84%, having been as high as 89% against Sunderland.

There’s no magic formula and pointing out those difficulties isn’t to say that’s how you guarantee beating Swansea, but it is clear that by pressuring the full-backs you can disrupt the natural rhythm of their game.