A machine?
Yes, that was how Yang Yang felt about the tactical philosophy of modern football.
The eleven players on the pitch were all like components, pieced together to form a machine for scoring goals and preventing them.
Efficiency and stability were what modern football pursued.
The reason was simple. Individual performances were always unstable, so a solid team structure was needed to suppress those unstable factors as much as possible before they could take root, allowing the entire team to play in a stable and efficient manner.
Professional football, when stripped down to its essence, was all about results.
Guardiola, the creator of Barcelona's Dream Team III, which was hailed as having pioneered a revolutionary football philosophy, had also adhered to a mechanistic approach during his time as coach. For instance, he had once required Henry to run in a specific way and reach a specific place at a specific time.
Yang Yang still remembered one occasion when Henry had tracked back, only to be harshly reprimanded by Guardiola. Guardiola did not need Henry to track back. He wanted him to remain fixed in that position because, after calculating the gaps that would appear there following several passes and movements, he had determined that passing the ball to Henry at that moment would create a threat.
Henry had found this extremely difficult to adapt to, because playing that way was too mechanical and dogmatic.
But there was no denying that Guardiola's team had been remarkably stable and efficient.
At the time, Liverpool, Yang Yang's club, had won the Champions League three times in five years, making Benitez's coaching record extraordinarily impressive. Yet everyone knew that Benitez's tactics were equally rigid. Some people had even said that if he were given eleven robots, he could win every match.
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