Absolutely staggering that a message board with hundreds of members and not one of you has mentioned Catenaccio football - which is as old as the hills and finds its roots way back in the 1930's.
en.wikipedia.org
Defensive football with counter attacking intent was made famous by Helenio Herrera in the 1960's and using this tactic he won 2 x European cups and 3 x Italian league titles with Internazionale of Milan.
Le Bris and SUNDERLAND AFC essentially played a variation of catenaccio football against you - and for some reason ceding possession and territory was judged by you lot as "Coventry City being the better side over both games" - which tells me how little you understand the basics of the game of football.
It was as though this was some mysterious and tabooed tactic - and yet none of you, including your manager, understood what was going on.
In 210 minutes of football you scored just 2 goals and your famous heading exploits were all but nullified, to the extent that it was little old Sunderland who settled it with a header.
We gave you the ball, invited you to break us down, you basically failed miserably and were quite justly dumped out of the play offs. Mayenda and Wilson simply waited, in the first leg, for your mistake riddled defence to make even more mistakes and scored with a "thank you very much".
In the second leg you won the box to box play - which doesn't matter because there is no frigging goal in that area - yet in the area that mattered, the penalty box, you huffed and you puffed and we essentially won the box play, which is where it matters.
This is no revelation and the tactic is as old as the hills, but of course in football what goes around comes around and perhaps managers like Le Bris (continental europeans) are students of the game and as such are adaptable to the game their team is involved in.
Maybe defensive play - deliberate defensive displays with counter attacking intent is making a comeback (did it ever go away) and for "catenaccio" we now have given it a modern name.
Today it was a different tactic - we were poor in the first half but excellent in the second half and as a result Sheffield United lost control of the game and totally mismanaged it. We had far more possession than we had against your mob and ultimately won, again through mistakes - but then again aren't all goals borne out of footballing mistakes (if no one made a mistake every game would end up 0 v 0).
so we are up and we will now see if we can stay up. Difficult but not impossible and whatever happens we are now tens of millions of pounds richer; thanks in part to Catenaccio football and Le Bris modern interpretation of it.
thank you all, including your manager, for completely mis reading our game against you and the tactics we played. Please do it again. absolutely clueless. You were done like a kipper.
