Modern football has evolved a number of
positions and roles which didn’t exist in the old six-lines-of-three schema:
the loose man in defence, the quarterback, the high half-forward, and that bête noire of the Melbourne press – the
tagger.
The loose man in defence is familiar to
those of us who follow soccer as the sweeper or libero. Combining extra security at the back with the ability to
set up play from the defence, liberi
were the characteristic accoutrement of tactically hip European soccer teams in
the late Cold War era, following their usage by both participants in the 1974
World Cup final (Franz Beckenbauer for West Germany and Arie Haan for the
Netherlands). In Australian football, the ‘loose man’ is typically a reasonably
tall forward who has been re-deployed on or behind the half-back line.
The quarterback is a role best exemplified
by Hawthorn captain Luke Hodge. It is an Americanism which gives us a shorter
way of saying ‘rebounding half-back flank/wingman’; the concept would probably
be better described by another borrowing from soccer: the Italian word regista, meaning ‘deep-lying playmaker’.
The quarterback launches his team’s attacking thrusts with runs or long kicks
from half-back. The old mantra that matches are won in lost in midfield is
belied by statistics which show little correlations between winning centre clearances
and winning matches; the reason for the success of Hawthorn, Sydney, and
Geelong over recent seasons can be divined by looking at the quality of those
two teams’ half-back lines.
The high half-forward is ‘high’ in the
sense of being an extra midfielder. Nothing more to see here than a
half-forward flanker pushed up into the centre of the field. If combined with
the loose man in defence, this would give a team seven defenders, six
midfielders, a ruckman, and four forwards.
And then there is the tagger, or to use a
common faux-euphemism, the ‘run-with
player’. Football was based on one-on-one match-ups for over a century; a
player who let his opponent run free was seen as having failed his team-mates
and his club by committing such a gross violation of the time-honoured codes of
Aussie machismo. But the need to win
matches and the sport’s increasing openness to innovations from abroad saw
teams use zonal marking, which people complained about. Then they brought back
old-school mano a mano footy by having
a tagger negate their opponent’s key player, and people complained about it.
‘Tagging’ first became an issue sometime in
the early-to-mid-2000s. As coach of the dominant turn-of-the-decade Collingwood
side, Mick Malthouse responded to the relentless tagging of Dane Swan and Scott
Pendlebury by rotating these players on and off the interchange bench faster than
their taggers could keep up; soon, teams were following suit and averaging over
a hundred interchanges per match. This helped to force the league’s hand and in
2011 we got the introduction of the substitute.
So the tagging controversy subsided for a
few years until Malthouse’s successor, Nathan Buckley, deployed Brent Macaffer
in the role to nullify Richmond’s star on-baller Trent Cotchin early in 2014.
Macaffer evidently did a good job, restricting Cotchin to thirteen possessions.
His reward was to be vilified by talking heads who evidently would prefer to
watch the stars of the game put together strings of uncontested possessions.
And what of the future? In English soccer,
the 2-3-5 formation was superseded by the ‘W-M’ formation (3-2-2-3) in the
early 1930s, yet players were still listed in newspapers according to their
position in the 2-3-5 formation well into the 1970s. Perhaps football positions
are going through the same phase: when you see the teams in the newspaper or on
The Footy Show on Thursday night,
does it really matter whether Joel Selwood is listed as the centre, the
ruck-rover, or the rover?
The way we talk about positions in the
future could go a number of ways. There is the soccer model, whereby
commentators might say things like ‘the Dockers are lining up in a 7-7-4’ and
all players might become defenders, defensive midfielders, midfielders,
attacking midfielders, or forwards. There is the basketball model, where the
traditional positional names are still used but all players on the court/field
are expected to go everywhere and to have both offensive and defensive duties.
Websites that cater for Dream Team and
SuperCoach participants certainly don’t use the eighteen traditional positions.
Fanfooty, for example, classifies league
footballers as ‘key defenders’, ‘small defenders’, ‘key forwards’, ‘small
forwards’, ‘inside midfielders’, ‘outside midfielders’, ‘rucks’, and ‘taggers’.
And I have no doubt that in the dressing rooms before a match, when describing
how they want their players to set up around the ground, Ross Lyon and Alistair
Clarkson do not once let the word ‘ruck-rover’ fall from their lips.
Perhaps a new set of positional names will
arise that recognise the blurring of the ruck-rover, rover, and centre into a
generic ‘midfielder’ role, the increasing difficulty in distinguishing between
those three positions and the wingmen, the mobility of forward pockets who
systematically push up into the midfield, and the evolution of half-forward
flankers into auxiliary midfielders. The new schema will also need to stop
lumping half-backs with backmen as ‘defenders’, given that rebounding
half-backs are among the most important players in their teams’ attacking
set-ups, allow for flexible numbers in players in each part of the ground, and
account for the all-important role of the tagger.
Here’s an attempt:
Left back pocket – Full back – Right back
pocket
(Sweeper)
Quarterback – Half-back – Deep-lying
midfielder
Wide midfielder – Second five-eighth – Wide
midfielder
Advanced midfielder – Half-forward –
Advanced midfielder
Deep-lying forward – Full forward – Deep-lying
forward
Ruckman – Ruck half – First five-eighth
(First tagger) – (Second tagger)
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