Jesse Marsch: A national identity

Two phases

I’ve found it’s best for players when I simplify the game and talk about it more in two phases: in-possession phase to defensive transition, or ball possession to counter-pressing, and rest defence and pressing, to attacking transition or winning balls, and then being effective in and aggressive in transition moments. Obviously even in those two phases, the game overlaps and intertwines, and there’s moments where you have to be connected with everything that happens, including set pieces, throws-ins, all of it, but really try to talk about things so that the players understand what the roles are, what the connections are, and then the why, the how, and the what. That’s what players look for nowadays, and so we’ve created a lot of our strategies around that, saying: ‘Here’s why we do this, because we think we’ll always be more prepared for whatever happens next in the game if we lose it, if we complete a pass, if we’re in transition, if we counter-press, whatever it may be, that we’re better connected than the opponent is at those moments.’

Wherever we are on the pitch, we want to be as compact as possible. So if we’re pressing all the way on a goal kick, we want our back line all the way on midfield: not one yard behind, not one foot behind, not one inch behind, all the way at midfield, and we want to always be as compact as possible when we’re against the ball. We use the term ‘the net’ - it’s the connection of the players and what their positioning is on the pitch at all moments. Against the ball, the net is basically when we draw triangles between the players, and then we help them think about exactly what their connections and their distances are to each other and visualise that together on the pitch. 

Against the ball, we’re always ball-orientated, pressing, we’re always moving and shifting and attacking the ball together, which we call ‘swarming’. We tell them to attack the ball and if they get beaten, don’t worry. If you create a system and you want to press and it’s off, and you’re telling your player, ‘Okay, you have to attack the ball, you have to think about winning the ball, don’t worry if you get beat,’ and the player that they’re playing against has quality and then all of a sudden goes by them on the first action, and if they’re all alone and don’t have anyone else there to help press, and then that player starts to cause trouble within our team, then the second time our player goes to press, they’re going to be more hesitant. They’re going to be a little bit more conservative and then by the third time, maybe they don’t press at all. So this idea is that we can really have a collective aggressiveness, that we can really attack the ball, that we can go for the ball and not worry about passing lanes, and if we get beaten, we’re all going to be close enough that the next player is  going to come and cover.

This swarming aspect winds up being the strength of the pressing model because they have strength and powers and they trust that they’re never alone on the pitch, and ultimately, anything we’re doing when we’re trying to instruct the game is making the players understand how they fit into a system, how their qualities can be rewarded, how we can play to their strengths, how we can play away from their weaknesses, and then how the collective understanding creates more power and confidence within what we’re doing. The other aspect of it is that it makes the players ahead of the ball and on the weak side, that it takes them away from defenders so they’re both in position to help press and attack defensively if one player gets beaten, and when we win the ball, we can quickly play forward, we can get out in transition, and we can now create room and space for us and reward ourselves for pressing and for transition moments. 

Five core concepts against the ball

I created five concepts for the coaching community in Canada, which apply to those two phases: one against the ball and into attacking transition, and one in possession to defensive transition. These five concepts are paramount to the things that we are seeking to create with the football in the country and with our national team.

What I say to them is, even if you want to play a different kind of style - because I don’t want to come there and tell everybody, ‘You have to play like this and you have to do that’ - this is more sharing the ideas, sharing the benefits of what we’ve created, and with these five concepts, I think these are actually essential to any style of play in modern football from what I’ve been able to see and gather from experiences that I’ve had at these levels.

1. Compact, launching, sprinting. When the ball is played, we attack the ball, we sprint together, and the first phase of the game. We teach our attacking players to feel like they’re hunters, and to be ready to be on the jump, and I say to them, ‘Okay, you have to do more than one thing. You have to think about supporting here. You have to think about protecting the defensive midfielder.’

2. Go in – last step – join in – swarm. ‘Go in’ is this action with the first player attacking the ball and making the last step. If the player you’ve attacked has passed the ball somewhere else, you ‘join in’: go and help attack the next pass and double-team that action together, and that is the action of swarming the ball together, into the second phase.

3. Forward defend – forecheck. If I’m a centre back, and there’s a striker 10 yards in front of me, and we’re starting to press, I need to be ready to step and forward defend. I still have to protect the line if anyone’s running through. Forward defending isn’t enough. The actual goal is to forecheck so that they can’t even touch the ball. 

4. First pass forward – diagonal. We say not to individually mark the player in the six position. The best thing is we want the defensive midfielders to get the ball because that’s the best place to win the ball, the most dangerous to score goals. In transition, we want to play often diagonal to diagonal.

5. Sprint and transition, score tap-in. All the phases fit together. We say that we want 80% of our goals out of the run of play to be tap-ins, but that requires moments where we have a good combination play and good possession play, leading to something dynamic where everybody’s ready to sprint at goal as soon as we start to have that trigger moment. There is a great example to illustrate this, during the Copa America against Peru, when we won the ball 20 yards from our goal through our striker at the top of the 18-yard box. He won the ball, and from there, the left winger and our other striker were immediately prepared and ready to attack and score. 

The players always have to be thinking, ‘What if?’ What if we lose it? What if we complete the pass? What if we cross it? What if we pull it back? What if I need to rest defence? What if I need space for possession? All over the pitch, we say every pass requires new movement and new positioning against the ball and they have to always be calculating in their heads. Are we going to keep it? Are we going to lose it? Do I have to close? Do I have to open? What’s my spacing? What’s my responsibility? Where’s the opponent? Where are we on the pitch? It’s about building the complexity and the understanding of what their role is within the model and making sure that they can understand how to apply it at the highest level.

We want to be always a team that’s attacking and defending with 11 players, a team that’s connected all over the pitch at all times, and that the commitment and the mentality to do everything together, to defend together, to attack together, to counter-press together. You can have the better players and you can have the better tactics, but if you don’t have a commitment to do everything it takes on the day, there’s a good chance that you’ll lose the battle.