Hey, shitty teams. A humble request: How about you stop giving up the easiest goals imaginable, making enormous errors in some misguided effort to play “beautiful soccer” and build up play from the back, and instead just lump the ball forward when facing your betters? This scourge must be stopped.
Just a couple hours ago Arsenal were gifted a gimme by BATE Borisov when their keeper passed the ball straight to a Gunner for no apparent reason. Now Everton have benefitted from a similar display of incompetence in the Europa League thanks to some garbage play by Apollon Limassol’s back line:
Scoring a goal is the hardest thing to do in soccer. It’s why the players who are good at it get all the money and glory, and it’s why even wildly overmatched teams can sometimes sneak a result from a game they otherwise would have no business taking any points from if the better team can’t quite manage to force the ball over the goal line. So by losing the ball right in front of or even inside your own penalty area, giving your opponent probably the easiest scoring chance they’ll receive all year, you are turning a thing that should extremely hard into something extremely easy.
And for what? Because Pep Guardiola has coached some iconic teams over the years and now many people think you’re a heathen if you don’t ask your center backs to pull off Cruyff turns in their own box? Starting your build-up play with your back line is good and can be really smart, but only if your players are good enough to ensure they never ever pass the ball straight to the opposing striker and give said striker a tap-in. What’s good for Manuel Neuer and Gerard Piqué isn’t necessarily what’s good for Denis Scherbitski and Héctor Yuste.
So please, just kick the damn thing into the center circle and try to win the second ball. You may lose the respect of soccer hipsters with words like “Trequartista” or “Guardiolismo” in their Twitter handles, but you just might win a few more points.
