Holders

Holder Your Horses

Just what is a DCM/HCM?  A regista or a "deep-lying midfielder?"  A pivot?  Heck, what's a double pivot?  Variations on a theme...

First, just the straightforward positional set up:

The two holders in the 4-2-3-1 (or 4-3-3...not necessary to get into the semantics of those particular differences now) are in yellow/red.  The back four are at midfield, with the front four ahead of the HCMs nearer the penalty area.  And that's the first key.  

The modern game has developed with a more even distribution of attacking and defensive personnel...in the early days, it was common to see something more akin to a 2-8 formation (defenders-attackers) but as people valued not getting scored on as a primary step to winning, more players were shifted to the back of the team.  The peak of this defensive shift was the infamous Italian "Cantenaccio" approach, in which a 4-4-2 established a deep back line with two "banks of four" compacting the game to a point at which the Italians, whether fairly or not, became associated with stagnant, reactive and negative play.  The English, through their oracle, Charles Reep, brought the "long ball" approach ensuring that only the forward(s) would attack...it took some time for defenses to sort out how to deal with long, vertical passes with fewer numbers.  Both conspired to present the world with perhaps the least-thoughtful and -entertaining era of the game.

These days, it has become clear that a balance must be struck somehow.  So the use of the HCMs as the linking players between two even groups of four shows balance across the team.  There are all manner of variations of this basic concept, but essentially this is the foundation or entry-level set up of the contemporary game.

While fans of Barcelona will recognize this next image, anyone who watched Everton under David Moyes (before he moved this year to Manchester United) will immediately think of Leighton Baines, and Tottenham fans will think of their outside backs Walker/Rose/Naughton and Assou-Ekotto (on loan this year) and how they've been so effective at getting forward.  There's tons of examples...including Fabinho and Ray Gaddis of our own Philly Union this season.  At the youth level, it's tough to get the outside backs to roam forward in ways that won't exhaust them, won't leave the team shorthanded defensively, and to recognize when they're needed versus what's a fool's errand!

However, the benefit of outside backs who can comfortably move up the field (and midfielders and attackers who can keep the ball...) is that the team shifts subtly from a 4-2-3-1 to something more like a 2-4-3-1.  That means in the case of a counter attack, the four defenders are really the four central players...maybe not great, but it does mean the center of the field should always be well-defended.  And in the time it takes the opponent to find a way 'round, the outside backs should be able to help out.  

That's all at a theoretical level, of course.  In reality, especially at the youth level, there is too much eagerness to go to goal regardless of the odds of actually scoring from a given chance, and too little ability to keep the ball for longer spells.  These two factors result in the wing backs never being able to catch up and join up, or in the case of the quick turnover, they get caught in no-man's-land, neither marking nor holding the back line and unable to close down the player with the ball in front of them.  

In the particular instance of my U13s in their opening state cup games this past weekend, the wing backs were asked specifically to stay home (as were the holders) which puts a lot of responsibility on the HCMs to link the back four to the front four.  But it also creates space in front of the HCMs, making it easier to play positively rather than sideways/backward, and it reduces the running required.  It's a more conservative approach, but ensuring that we almost always have 6 between the ball and our GK makes attacking us tough...and our front four are tasked with being very aggressive (not counting on the wing backs to offer easy outlets away from pressure or to create 2v1s on the wings) and self-reliant.

Some moments were better than others, but it's a good starting point, and depending on the quality of a given opponent, we'll make tweaks as able.  See if you can spot the shifts!