-A pretty entertaining and interesting article from soccernet.com. I
love the descriptions and the comments made by the columnist.
Sharing the Burden
by Phil Ball
Whilst the Athletic Bilbao v Real Madrid match last Saturday night
produced a predictable result (Athletic won), the game threw up
some interesting statistics.
Urzaiz: An ariete who has been showing signs of
being a buitre
(JohnWalton/Empics)
Santi Esquerro, the forward whose powerful header won the game for
the Basques, was celebrating his first goal for the club in seven
months of honest toil, and Raúl, a rather better-known forward,
scored his first in the league for six months - the last time he
hit the net having been in Bilbao last March, curiously
enough.
The other goal was scored by Ismael Urzaiz, a burly centre-forward
of the old school, a player who looks like he's stepped out of some
flickering sepia film from the pre-television days - all beef and
brawn and nothing fancy.
Urzaiz actually scored the goal with his foot when Raúl Bravo,
allegedly a defender for Madrid, completely missed the flight of a
cross from the left intended for big Ismael. It never looks quite
right when this sort of player scores with his feet (it was his
second such effort in five days), and it set me thinking about the
whole concept of the goalscorer, and how the Spanish both view and
define the phenomenon.
The Spanish have three terms for a goalscorer. The most neutral is
delantero centro which
simply means 'centre-forward'. The term tells you nothing about the
style of the player, but merely indicates that his general function
is to hang around up front. He's probably big, but not necessarily.
The term which implies physical size is ariete, which translates as
'striker', or 'target-man'.
The other type of goalscorer is the buitre - literally a vulture, but
which translates fairly comfortably into English as 'poacher', the
six-yard man whose instincts always permit him to be in the right
place at the right time. Urzaiz is an ariete, as is Madrid's Morientes,
Osasuna's Aloisi, Real Sociedad's Kovacevic, Salva at Atlético
Madrid, Deportivo's Pandiani and so on.
The buitres are a rarer
breed, personified in the past by Butragueño and Hugo Sánchez, but
in the current league perhaps only represented by Henrik Larsson
and Michael Owen, both recent imports. The 'delantero centro' is a rather more
complex model, and forms the focus for this week's Spanish
chit-chat.
This is because the more ambiguous the role of the forward, the
more successful the team seems to be, at least in Spain these
days.
A good example of this is Real Sociedad. They're the side I get to
watch the most of in La Liga, since they play in my home from home,
San Sebastián.
For three of the last four seasons the team has flirted with
relegation, with a mysterious but wonderful runners-up year slotted
in-between. They're bottom of the pile again, having lost to
Sevilla at the weekend. The local paper, for whom I occasionally
write, publish agonised articles on a daily basis from journalists
attempting to get to the bottom of the matter.
The theories point the finger at the usual suspects - poor defence,
lack of bite in midfield, general lack of aggression and
concentration in some of the players...and so on and so forth. The
journalists also bemoan a lack of clinical finishing, a feature
classically associated with struggling sides.
Successful sides always build from the back, but when it comes to
failure, most analysts look at the blanks being fired by the
forward line. Sociedad have a big ariete called Darko Kovacevic who
has scored over 80 league goals in six seasons for the club - not a
bad tally. The little Turk Nihat plays in the hole behind him, and
between them they're supposed to carry the goalscoring weight. But
they've dried up.
Kovacevic, particularly, appears weekly in the newspaper telling
some local journalist that 'It's just a matter of time' and that
he's not over-concerned with the drought. What's more important is
his general contribution to the team's play - which is what
strikers always say when they're not scoring.
And yet no-one in the city seems to be aware of the real problem,
which is that Sociedad's whole strategy is to get the ball down the
flanks and haul it across to Kovacevic, in the vague hope that
he'll connect. But he rarely does, because the crosses are often
poor and the opposing defenders soon learn how to cut off the lines
of communication.
So Kovacevic himself drops back into the hole, stumbles about doing
things he doesn't really know how to do, whilst the managers shrug
their shoulders and collect their severance pay. There's no Plan B.
The team knows it has a recognised goalscorer, and so the only way
to win is to supply him.
He's a local hero who cannot be dropped. The guy who plays behind
him in the hole depends on rebounds and errors from the opposing
defenders, rather than the build-up strategy of the midfielders
behind him - if, that is - the team is only looking for the big
man.
