Introduction:Level three has, in short, been defined on this site as the blueprint used by some of the greatest managers in history, in particular the model established by Renus Michels and the Dutch 'Total Football sides', also Sacchi's great Milan side, and the Dinamo Kiev teams of Maslov and further developed by Lobanyovski. The attacking aspect of this blueprint is what sticks in the mind most easily, but this is not the fundamental basis of the blueprint. The fundamentals are pressing, tactical flexibility and the ability to also play level one (backs to the wall) and level two (counter attacking) football as and when needed.
In terms of the eleven players on the pitch in a single game, this blueprint established in the 60's has not advanced beyond Sacchi's Milan. Arguably it's doubtful that we will ever see a change as fundamental as the introduction of pressing and the blurring of strict player positions ever again.
That does not, however, mean that football has, or will, stop developing altogether, and in my view Rafael Benitez is at the forefront of taking these blueprints further, and establishing new fundamentals for the top managers of the future.
So how is he doing this?
The answer lies in what are, almost certainly, his two most controversial methods: Rotation, and playing to exploit opponent's weak areas, rather than establishing our own strengths and playing to those instead. The two are of course linked, but let's look at them separately first before we find the joins.
Rotation:Rotation is about fitness. Players cannot stay fully fit for three games in one week. This isn't up for debate, it's not a matter of opinion, it's simply a physical fact. A player can no more maintain full fitness playing this often then he can fly or breath underwater. The main drawback of employing pressing, especially the Sacchiano high-line offside trap pressing system is that it makes huge physical demands on the players. If you aren't fully fit, you can't fully press. If you can't fully press, you can't control your opponent.
Of all managers, Rafa is arguably the one who has embraced this creed the earliest and the most whole heartedly. Most of his squad decisions and substitutions, which so often seem to make no sense on an intuitive or even tactical level, make complete sense when viewed in terms of fitness levels. Being able to press hard all game every game is already the one quality that even Rafa's critics would acknowledge as one of our big strengths.
In this sense, I'd liken Rafa's approach to that of athletes who run distances of 400m or greater. There are two approaches one can take...go out of the blocks as fast as possible in order to blow away the opposition before the race nears the finish, or aim to run a 'flat' race, namely to try and run at the same pace at the end of the race as at the beginning. By conserving some energy at the start, such runners 'kick', usually most obvious in the final 50-400m (depending on the race distance), apparently sprinting away from the rest of the field in the final stages. These athletes are actually not so much speeding up at the end of the race as they are exploiting the depleted energy reserves of the opposition. Rafa's use of Aimar for Valencia and tendency to do the minimum possible in beating inferior opposition are the football equivalent of this tactic.
Personally, I would cite Man United as the one of the best examples of how devastating this approach can be. It seems to me that Ferguson has only fully embraced squad rotation since Rafa's arrival in Britain. Ever the pragmatist, Ferguson has seen the future and been given a lot of credit for an idea that was not his, and that he rejected for a very long time. The Man United side of last season is the strongest I've ever seen, Ferguson himself called it his best team, and no Man United team before has rotated as much as last season's model.
As far as I'm concerned rotation is the closest thing we have to pressing, in terms of a new development that in future will come to be seen as uncontroversial and as fundamental to success as pressing was. You can see it already with managers like O'Neill. He's a great manager but his 'pick your best 11' approach is already starting to look like anachronistic, and is cited as a risk for that team by many of the same pundits who will happily ridicule Rafa for pioneering rotation.
In short, fitness is a massive strength, one of the few strengths that can be fully controlled, is perhaps more important in this league than any other, and we have at the helm the manager who values and understands the importance of fitness and the value of implementing rotation in preserving fitness (arguably) better than any other manager in the world.
Exploiting Weaknesses:This is probably even more controversial than rotation, and is an area where I think Rafa is genuinely unique. Of course, no manager (not even Wenger) actively ignores the strengths and weaknesses of his opposition, but how many would use a whole different formation and style of play to nullify strengths and exploit weaknesses, rather than tinkering with the established blueprint?
I can't think of any like Rafa. I can't think of any who have started and won games using three distinctly different formations in one season, and I can't think of any who might play a 3-4-3 with an emphasis on direct play one game, switching to a 4-4-2 with emphasis on possession the next, switching to a 4-5-1 with emphasis on counter attack the next, with the according personnel changes.
There's a lot I love about our manager, but certainly in a footballing sense this aspect shines out brighter than anything else. It is this which I think could make Rafa the first true 'level four' manager, and it is this which gives me confidence that despite ownership and financial handicaps, Rafa is the man to not just win us our next title, but to re-establish Liverpool as a dynastic force.
The way I see it, the 'play to your strengths' approach produces a slightly higher top level of performance, when all the top players are fit and in form. However, where it falls down is the fact that this is a very rare occurrence. There are only a small handful of games in any given season when all the best players are available and on form. On the other hand, if you know what your opponent will do, and have an effective strategy to combat that, it is possible to beat even the very strongest opponents with a very limited squad, as Greece showed in winning the European Championships, and as we showed in winning the Champion's League.
Combining the two:Being able to exploit an opponent's weaknesses in each and every game requires a deep squad with lots of different options. Again I doubt even Rafa's strongest critic would argue that Rafa hasn't been building towards this. We may lack quality in depth in the squad, but we excel in terms of tactical flexibility. However, we can't simply keep players like, say, Benayoun for the three games each season they are absolutely perfect for. You can't expect players to come in cold and perform, hence this makes rotation doubly important. It also makes training even more important for us than other sides, and explains why Rafa places such huge emphasis on how players perform during training. If they can't follow specific instructions at Melwood, how can Rafa have any faith in a player's ability to implement these instructions on the pitch?
Of course this has it's drawbacks. Under a manger like Wenger, it's reasonable to assume that Babel, for example, might be doing much better. However, this doesn't mean it's the wrong approach, just a demanding one that some players, who may seem to tick all the boxes, will simply never be able to adapt to, especially when there is not the track record of league success yet that can force players to see things differently, like say Solskjaer did for many years.
Ultimately, I see Rafa's approach as simply being the logical next step of journey set in motion by Scotland when they first decided to pass the ball to each other instead of running with it. It's the team over the individual, versatility over specialisation, strategy over pure motivation. In short, I see it as the Liverpool Way for the 21st century, and I can't help but feel that Shanks and Paisley, if they are watching Rafa, are nodding in quiet approval at what the man is doing for us.
I'm no footballer, I've no real talent for playing the game, but trying to put myself in a players shoes I have to ask myself, who would I rather play against?
Would I rather know exactly what I will face when I step out onto the pitch? Would I rather be able to play my own game, to what I see as my biggest strengths? Or would I rather play against a team that forces me to step outside my comfort zone? A team that seems to understand my plan A, and responds to it by doing something I actively hate playing against?
If you want an example that crystallises the whole of this post into a single passage of play, you could do a lot worse than Keane's goal against Arsenal.
Arsenal don't like physical sides. They don't like being made to defend long balls. They don't like opponents to be in their face all the time. So what do you do...play them at their own game? Or play them at a game they actively despise? Then ask yourself this...of all the teams in all the world, who would you think Arsenal would least like to play? Their responses to their increasingly regular poor performances against us would suggest to me that we're that team, and the increasing, if grudging, admiration many of their fans have towards Rafa reinforces that view. After all, the older fans had their own pragmatists in Chapman and Graham...they built their great history on pragmatists, and they haven't forgotten how much sweeter it is to win then it is to entertain.
You know what? I'd rather be the team that everyone hates to play against then the team that everyone loves to watch. Especially if our approach to the next game is to comprehensively out-pass and out-class exactly the sort of physical side that Arsenal hate to play, and who we resembled only 4 days earlier - a team we could only out-play as we did precisely because we are prepared to match their physicality.
In the immortal words of Millwall supporters:
"Everyone hates us and we don't care." Damn right.
Original Level 3 threads:
http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=225700.0http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=225701.0http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=225239.0Check this out for a respected Arsenal view of Benitez Vs Rafa. Myles Palmer articulates this basic difference in approaches beautifully:
http://www.arsenalnewsreview.co.uk/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=1151&cntnt01origid=30&cntnt01returnid=42
Also some excellent analytical pieces by Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger (with application of 'Moneyball'-style principles to the progress of Freiburg in Germany) - an alternative vision of a potential level 4, which relates to a post later in this thread by Royhendo:
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=437614&root=europe&cc=5739
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=439196&root=europe&cc=5739
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=440429&root=europe&cc=5739
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=441506&root=europe&cc=5739
My Sacchi thread...a theory piece on Rafa but more relevant to where we are at now:
http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/index.php?topic=231088.msg4954589#msg4954589
