2018 World Cup qualifying match review: Kyrgyzstan v. Australia at Bishkek

Being a connoisseur of sport in the former Soviet Union, I was looking forward to seeing the Socceroos play at the Spartak Stadium in the city formerly known as Frunze.

An article in the antipodean edition of the Guardian gives a feel of the essential post-Sovietness of the ground: dilapidated seating, low-grade turf, and Cyrillic writing, the city’s residents housed in rows upon rows of khrushchyovka. It’s the sort of description calculated to repulse the (post-)modern globalised consumerist Westerner, but it serves as a reminder that there was once another world, born in revolt against capitalism and more real than our baudrillardien pottage of hypocrisy and hyperreality.

Both teams lined up in an alledged 4-3-3 on a pitch that looked not so much post-Soviet as post-grass. The tone for the match was set in the first minute, when the Socceroos attacked from the kick-off, Mathew Leckie drawing a foul. The subsequent free kick was belted in by Mile Jedinak, and the Asian champions had taken their first step down the road to Russia in 2018.

Before they could get settled in, however, the Snow Leopards came at them with all guns blazing. They had mounted two attacks on Mat Ryan’s goal by the seventh minute, the suspiciously European-sounding Edgar Bernhardt looking particularly dangerous. Indeed, the visitors’ next half-chance came in the seventeenth minute. At one end, Mirlan Murzaev hit the side netting; at the other, Nathan Burns had a penalty shout turned down. By the half-hour mark, eight shots had been taken, three-quarters of them by ак барстар.

Defender Daniel Tagoe was cautioned for his challenge on Leckie, but i gialloverdi could do little with the ensuing free kick-corner kick combo. The teams went into the sheds with a 1-0 scoreline showing on the electronic scoreboard in that 1980s alarm clock font, but the real stars of the show were the home side, determined to take the game to their illustrious opponents, and the turf, whose pot-holes and unpredictable bounce forced both sides to avoid the midfield passovotchka and engage in a relentless end-to-end shootout.

After the break, the men in red from the steppes showed that they had more tricks up their sleeve. Their tactic of javelin-throwing the ball into the box at throw-ins almost resulted in Murzaev doing a play-the-ball into the goal. Still threatening with three-quarters of the match played, Kyrgyzstan would finish ahead nine to two on corners and nineteen to eleven on shots. They had dictated the frenetic tempo of the match, and it would be their undoing as a steal by Mark Milligan in the Australian half was passed to a charging Tommy Oar on the left wing, who coolly slotted the ball past the keeper.

To the credit of the Central Asians, they persisted with their high-intensity game, their forcing of a pressured clearance from Ryan just two minutes later nearly resulting in a goal for Anton Zemlianukhin. They did get one back deep in injury time, when a corner kick came off the head of captain Azamat Baymatov and was fully over the line before appearing to touch the hand of substitute forward Almazbek Mirzaliev at the far post. The other interesting occurrence came in the seventy-ninth minute, when a piece of the advertising hoarding surrounding the pitch fell over of its own accord.

But these descriptions of who scored and in which minute don’t do justice to this match. This was the most frenzied ninety minutes I have ever seen: counter-attack upon counter-attack, long balls, verticality, hurried clearances, powerfully launched throw-ins, pressing and gegenpressing. It was as if a new game had been born, one devoid of the tedious passenacio which has come to define modern football. And it was all thanks to a team nicknamed, of all things, the Snow Leopards.

Kyrgyzstan 1 (Azamat Baymatov 92’) – Australia 2 (Mile Jedinak 2’; Tommy Oar 67’)

Cautions: Daniel Tagoe (Kyr.) 31’; Bakhtiyar Duyshobekov (Kyr.) 57’; Alex Wilkinson (Aust.) 83’

Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part three

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)

Rotating the Midfield: A History of Australian Football Positions: part two

Teams in the major state leagues were first allowed to use a replacement player (generally labelled the ‘nineteenth man’) in 1930, with a second permitted in 1946. Like substitutes in soccer and replacements in rugby union, these could only be used once and the replaced player could not return to the field. They also tended to be used late in matches to replace injured or fatigued players – it was probably not until Ron Barassi’s switch of Ted Hopkins for the under-performing Westralian rover Bert Thornley at half-time in the 1970 VFL Grand Final that the sport awoke to the possibility of tactical substitutions.

The interchange bench was initially used sparingly: Geelong and Hawthorn made only eleven and twelve interchanges respectively in the 1989 Grand Final, but made eighty-one and eighty-two respectively when they next faced in off in the decider in 2008. The more cunning coaches pushed for a larger bench, particularly Kevin Sheedy, who at Football Park in 1985 caused Victoria to lose a State of Origin match on forfeit due to his illegal use of a third replacement. They got it: three interchange players were permitted from 1994, four from 1998, and even larger benches were utilised in pre-season and State of Origin matches.

With the rise of the cult full-forward in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it didn’t seem evident that football was headed towards an era of positional universality. In fact, with the exaltation of Dunstall, Lockett, Kernahan, Modra, and (after his 1993 conversion from wingman/flanker) Ablett, it felt like football was going back to the 1930s, when Coventry, Pratt, Nash, and Todd were their teams’ superstars.

Things, however, were changing. Tactics such as zonal marking and the full-court press were being borrowed from soccer and basketball (often pioneered on these shores by the aforementioned Sheedy) and the dribbling code’s three-way conceptualisation of player positions (defenders-midfielders-forwards), which arose in Brazil in the 1950s (what came to be known as midfielders were previously known as half-backs), began to be adopted in place of football’s traditional six lines of three. There were now six defenders and six forwards and in between them, five or six midfielders, depending on how one classified the ruckman.

This conceptual shift has changed the way the sport is seen and played. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the only player types that exist nowadays are ‘talls’ and ‘midfielders’: a team typically has a ruckman, a full-back, a centre half-back, a centre half-forward, a full-forward, and perhaps a second ruckman resting in a pocket; the remainder are ‘midfielders’. Players stationed in a flank or a pocket will regularly change into a midfield position, and the roles of the centreman, the ruck-rover, and the rover have blurred into each other so much that the three position names are seldom used anymore.

The watershed year in the evolution of modern football was 2000. In that year, Waverley Park was replaced by a boutique stadium in the Docklands with a retractable roof. Essendon adapted best to the new conditions and went one win short of a perfect season; their only loss was to a technically inferior team (Terry Wallace’s Western Bulldogs) who outwitted them with tactics (flooding). The artificial turf and lack of wind or rain made for a more sanitised brand of football, and with the new stadium hosting roughly one-quarter of AFL matches, teams now began to prioritise the recruitment of ‘talls’.

With modern football being characterised by rolling stoppages (the opening round of the 2015 season featured an average of sixty-nine ball-ups per match), the other priority of recruiters is on finding players with the athleticism to attend ruck contests in all parts of the ground. This focus has given us the generic ‘midfielder’: a player who can rotate between ruck-rover, rover, centre, wing, and flank positions in the course of a match (along with his regular spells on the bench) and who dominates Brownlow voting and Dream Team point-scoring. Not specialising in any particular position, he is classified as an ‘inside mid’ or an ‘outside mid’; terminology which brings to mind rugby union’s distinction between the ‘inside centre’ and the ‘outside centre’ and which therefore highlights the stoppage-centric nature of the modern game.