"I played against this 'Messi', and I begged my mother! At that time, it was not possible to catch him. If you think about obstructing him, you will not be able to catch up with him. When I was in Madrid, Ramos was assigned to monitor Messi and go with him wherever he went, but you discover after the match that Ramos has been manipulated, it's very difficult to defend against him, so I don't think we should watch him even though he's now slower than before and doesn't run as well as before."
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Those were the words of former Netherlands player Rafael van der Vaart before the Netherlands-Argentina match, and they tell us that the issue of stopping Messi is still the most important challenge for everyone who meets the flea, and despite the relatively easy task on paper when Leo wears the national team shirt, he continues to complicate matters for everyone. Because he simply reproduces himself from time to time, as if being a genius wasn't enough.
The journey began as a winger on the right side, then turned to depth in the role of the imaginary striker, then an outright playmaker in the era of Luis Enrique and beyond, and recently with his advancing age we are in front of the “wise” Messi who plays in the midfield, believes Valdano, the Argentine player. The former director of Real Madrid, that time has made Messi wiser, and that is the normal result of 1000 professional matches.
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In front of the Netherlands, and because of the presence of a coach of the value of Louis van Gaal, there were great expectations to see an innovative scheme to stop Messi, and it was, Van Gaal gave us an additional idea against stopping the flea, and despite the consistency of Van Gaal’s scheme and his success in keeping Messi as much as possible from the danger zones, we, as usual We saw a manifestation of genius from Messi that was capable of demolishing the temple on the heads of those in it, which was repeated again in the Croatia match in the semi-finals, but let us now focus on the Netherlands match, and let us get to the heart of the matter directly.
no new under the sun
Before the Argentina-Australia match, writer and sports analyst for "The Athletic" John Mueller wrote a report entitled "Here's How to Stop Messi". Playing in recent years, as looking at Messi's reception map of the ball in that edition of the tournament, we find that he is active in the depth of the field to influence the course of the game more instead of isolating himself on the side.
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Messi receives map - World cups - Since 2010 pic.twitter.com/vz6xCeezAy
- Peak x2 (@STActics3) December 13, 2022
"The first thing you need to know is where to find him. That's easy: he's the little guy walking around with his head down like he's lost his contact lens somewhere in the grass near the right half of the space."
(John Mueller)
That is precisely what Van Gaal did, mobilizing the largest number of players to close the depth of the field and leaving the sides entirely to push Messi to the right side and try to pressure him there, or force him to go down to low areas and keep him away from influential areas as much as possible.
During the defense with a medium mass, Jacko takes over the control of Enzo Fernandez, with Bergwijn and Memphis stationed in the distance inside to close the passing paths for depth, specifically for the Argentine midfielders McAllister and Rodrigo de Paul, who are monitored individually by De Ron and Frenkie de Young, respectively.
While defending with reduced mass, Bergwijn and Jakobo fall back down for two reasons;
The first of them is to close the diagonal passing paths for depth, especially on Messi, and secondly, to achieve the necessary agglomeration to blow up the possibility of playing between the team lines, so that the distance between them and the defenders becomes impenetrable with the roles of Frenkie and De Roon in trying to read the paths of play and chasing those who try to receive behind Jakbo and Bergwijn.
The other thing that Van Gaal did was to take advantage of the safety element provided by playing with 5 defenders, by assigning the defender closest to Messi to go out to meet him without hesitation and press him to the end while asking for the ball, in order to achieve a very simple idea;
Forcing the Argentine players to search for other options to pass away from the “observer” Messi, and forcing Messi himself to play with his back to the goal for as long as possible if he received it, and pushing him to pass back.
It was really effective. According to "Stats Bomb" data, Liu passed only 48 passes in 120 minutes, which is his weakest number in the tournament. 46% of those passes were under pressure, and most importantly, 31% of them were behind, exactly as Van Gaal planned. It is Messi's turn to make his own contribution to solving the problem.
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Messi pass map against the Netherlands:
– 48 passes
– 83% accuracy
– 46% under pressure
– 31.25 backward passes pic.twitter.com/ZEt2VdYLeG
- Peak x2 (@STActics3) December 13, 2022
After Blind cut the ball from De Paul while trying to link up with Messi, the latter seemed to have run out of patience, and pressed directly on Memphis Depay in an attempt to kill off the offensive transformation of the Dutch team, Messi succeeded in pushing Memphis and affecting the accuracy of his pass, which reached Otamendi instead of Bergwijn , before the defender flicked it straight to right-back Molina in an attempt to counter-attack.
As soon as the ball reached Molina, Messi began to inspect his surroundings with visual exploration, and took the necessary information to overlap. Leo used what he saw well, as he took advantage of the Dutch players' rebound towards their goal to protect their areas during the defensive transformation process, and began to go down against the movement of the defenders to request the ball from Molina.
Due to the exclusion of Bergwijn after a Memphis pass, and the slow rebound of Jakbo and Memphis to maintain the necessary conglomerate for the team's structure, this provided an opportunity for Messi to request the ball in a larger space after Frenkie preferred to stay and not press him before the ball left Molina's feet, and here specifically was one of the most prominent events of the match, Because this time Messi receives the ball without pressure, with a physical position that supports progress against a structure trying to reorganize itself after losing the ball.
After the ball left Molina’s feet, Frenkie jumped to put pressure on Messi, but the latter absorbed the pressure with a deceptive first touch against the direction of the Dutchman, which is all he needed to bypass Frenkie and adjust the angles of play from the outside to the inside to speed up his steps immediately after that and advance diagonally towards the goal, and the rest you know. .
Van Gaal provided an additional model in the suggestion box for how to stop Messi, which contains hundreds and perhaps thousands of volumes, but as usual Messi still has the secrets of solving matches, and despite his advanced age and poor physical condition, the Argentine mind is still able to produce the best solutions ever. against various models and schemes.
We forgot to tell you that John Mueller had obliterated his analysis before he started, as he considered that analysis to be completely unimportant, for a very simple reason;
Teams will study and try these tactics, and then they go to the field empty-headed, like a student who studies for the final exam, and once he enters the exam he forgets everything, and that is exactly what playing against Lionel Messi does.
How did he see it?
For the neutral viewer, perhaps those details were not the focus of his attention as much as he was interested in the pass with which Messi made the goal for Molina. It was the most prominent question for several days;
How did Messi Molina see before passing?
Although the replays of the goal that were shown from various angles, Messi did not raise his head to know where Molina was, how did he pass to him?
Relationships within the field arise through communication, and the main reason for the poor level of national football compared to club football is the low level of communication between the players as a result of the limited time the players spend together in the national team compared to clubs. Hakimi is there in the Princes' Garden, where the two have been training for months together, not Molina, whom Leo had just seen a week before the tournament, so the scene did not reflect the understanding of the two, but rather expressed more of Messi's exceptional capabilities.
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(Reuters)
The player must be aware of the important information about him, because if he is able to perceive it, it is more likely to be taken into account in the decision-making process. Players must pay attention to the largest amount of information, and most importantly pay attention to how this information changes all the time, so the importance and quality of The exploratory behaviors of the players, indeed, that clip that came to your mind of Xavi Hernandez checking his surroundings thousands of times is what we mean, but recent research proves that moving the head may not always be the best strategy!
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Human vision is divided into two main parts: central vision, and peripheral vision. Christian Vater, a researcher in sports sciences at the University of Bern, Switzerland, believes that on the football field, you will not be able to get the greatest An amount of information is obtained only with central vision, but peripheral vision must be used, and the sharper the player's peripheral vision, the greater his ability to pay attention to a greater level of detail and then produce better decisions on the field.
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Also, according to Vater, there are 3 different visual strategies that athletes use in different sports. The first strategy that everyone knows is “Visual Pivot” or the axis of sight in literal translation, and it is used when the distance increases between important sources of information that the player wants to explore, so the player moves his head in different directions to capture That information with his central gaze, Xavi Hernandez may be the best promoter of that strategy, as his head may not have stopped stopping until now.
The second strategy is called "Foveal Spot", used when we need to collect information with high visual acuity, by focusing our gaze on the most important place (the source) so that we can capture this information, for example, in a 1 on 1 situation The defender needs to focus on the opponent's thigh, because his thigh tells us key information about the direction he is going to go.
In fact, if he points his thigh to the right, he is more likely to turn to the right, and here he must focus on that area to get the information and deal with the situation.
The third strategy is the "Gaze Anchor", and it is used in situations where there is a strong time pressure, where decisions must be taken in a very short period of time, the player suspends his gaze in the middle between several variables to capture all of them, and this strategy is very famous in handball Beach, where the researchers found that the defenders do not look at the ball or the opposing attacker, but focus their gaze between the two sources at the moment of kicking the ball, to get acquainted with them together to make the most appropriate decision to go to the right or left or stay in place to block the ball.
You are probably impatient now and wondering what this has to do with Messi?
The fact is that Messi saw Molina using one of these strategies, as he could not see him clearly because of the speed of his progress with the ball with the pressure of Nathan Ake, and he did not find time to take his eyes off the ball and move his head to the other side because that would lose contact with the ball, and thus there would be a possibility of losing it or trackable loss.
So Messi tried to adapt to those data by using the third strategy, that is, suspending the gaze, and the pictures from that angle show that the flea did not focus his gaze on the ball, nor could he raise his head to see Molina, but instead “hung” his gaze between the ball, Aki, Molina, and perhaps Van Dyck for seconds. So that he can maintain visual contact with everyone at the same time with the tip of his eye, before he passes an impossible ball from between Aki's feet, in front of Molina, reversing Van Dyke's move!
Don't fall into the trap of letting that make you forget that the pass itself was another masterpiece, or as Valdano says;
Messi is Maradona every day!
Even Molina does not know how the ball reached him, but he scored anyway, and thanks to that Argentina went to the semi-finals after a marathon match, and then reached the final, and the dream of winning the tournament still haunts Messi's imagination in his last adventure in the World Cup.
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Sources:
1- Van der Vaart's statements about the confrontation between Argentina and the Netherlands
2- Analyzing Messi's data biography - Guardiola era (Stats Bomb)
3- "Messi liberated": Jorge Valdano on Argentina, politics and his goal in 1986 (Guardian)
4- How to stop Messi (The Athletic)
5- Messi passes map against the Netherlands
6- Non-verbal communication in football
7- What gave Xavi and Pirlo a leap over the rest?
(Sky Sports)
8- Christian Vater - visual acuity in football