Saturday, May 26, 2012

FC Barcelona - Athletic Club: Man-Marking


FC Barcelona lineup                                                                   Athletic Club lineup





Marcelo Bielsa has showed this system before against Barcelona. It requires amazing stamina, dicipline and work-rate to play against FC Barcelona, who are so good with the ball. They always try to pressure the man with the ball and also the man whom the next pass goes. Every Athletic player had their own player to mark, even when they have to mark him 30-40 meters, like the full backs, or Amorebieta, or the Midfielders to cover the runs from deep midfield to the box.
LLorrente was Athletic's main man up front. he was the first one to start with the pressing. He had the job to cover Pique and Mascherano. Also goalkeeper Pinto if needed.
Athletics's wingers had to mark Barca's full backs. Ibai covers Montoya and Susata covers Adriano. Barcelona have the 1-2 midifled, with Busquets behind Xavi & Iniesta. To cover that you have to have the reverse formation (2-1) with Munain, who covers Busquets, ahead of De Marcos (Xavi) and Javi Martinez (Iniesta)



To cover Barcelona's front trio, Athletic had their full backs to cover Barcelona's wingers (Aurtenexte-Pedro & Iraola Alexis) That leaves the two central defenders to cover Messi. Usually they had Amorebieta to cover Messi and Ekiza as a sweeper to cover the space behind.
That here shows you that Athletic players will cover their men with very long distances. De Marcos goes with Xavi who made a deep run inside and Aurtenexte goes with Pedro who came from the wing to transfer the ball to the other flank.
Amorebieta had the biggest role to cover Messi. Messi loves to come from the deep to collect the ball and drag the defenders out of their positions to creat more space up front. Pedro and Alexis both take their place.
Pedro & Alexis up front, Messi is the second last man of this team, dragged one of Athletics defenders out of position to create a 2v3 situation up front.








5 comments:

  1. i just can't get enough of you allas

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  2. Allas, you are just get better! I really love your observation!

    ReplyDelete
  3. u can become tito assistant coach

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey Allas can you give Download Link or smth like that for your complitation (Barcelona Skills 2011) ???

    ReplyDelete