Their post on Argentina-Germany was predictably harsh. (“There was so little element of ‘tactics’ to it that it barely deserves talking about,” they wrote about the final 20 minutes.) It was always coming, unless Argentina won it all, since Maradona’s tactics were always suspect.
One area where I was enlightened regarded Messi and Tevez. To my less-tutored eye, Tevez seemed to be having a good match … he was all over the place, and where was Messi? ZM:
They had little width high up the pitch, whilst Tevez and Messi operated too close together. Messi increasingly dropped deeper and deeper to pick up possession, summing up his frustration at a lack of service. Such is the love for knee-jerk reactions and an obsession with using the phrase ‘big game bottler’, Messi will probably be blamed for putting in a poor performance in this game, but he actually did rather well. He weaved in and out of challenges and played some genuinely excellent passes (that weren’t forthcoming from Argentina’s midfielders), but he was simply being forced to play too deep, with Tevez eating up the space he wanted to occupy.
I remember one specific instance in the first half in which he began his run 10 yards inside his own half.
Posted by: Sean | Saturday, July 03, 2010 at 11:45 AM