We've Made The Times

Discussion in 'Bulletin Board' started by dreamboy3000, Mar 10, 2021.

  1. dreamboy3000

    dreamboy3000 Well-Known Member

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  2. Dan

    DannyWilsonLovechild Well-Known Member

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  3. Basil Fawlty

    Basil Fawlty Member

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    Any chance someone could paste the full article?

    I'm a tight Yorkshireman, I don't want to pay for it!
     
  4. ronnieGlavinsB@stardSon

    ronnieGlavinsB@stardSon Well-Known Member

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    THE GAME DAILY | GREGOR ROBERTSON

    ‘Vertical football’ and intense press: how Barnsley learned to ignore the haters
    Valérien Ismaël’s side are dreaming of a top-flight return with a style of play that has ruffled plenty of feathers in the Championship, writes Gregor Robertson
    When Blackburn Rovers visited Oakwell last month Tony Mowbray did something pretty remarkable. The Rovers manager is well known for his commitment to expansive, possession-based football. Only a few Championship teams average more possession. Only league leaders Norwich City average more passes per game. Yet Mowbray recognised that, “If you try and play out against Barnsley, then you’ll generally be in trouble,” he said.

    Blackburn, therefore, ditched their favoured system, played three at the back, two up front and, rather than play through midfield, opted instead to go from back to front. “They’re a very direct team, play out of possession football, they press extremely well from the front and the stats would suggest they’re the best at the way they press with the front three,” he said after Rovers’ 2-1 defeat. “It’s not how I like to play football.”

    Seven straight Sky Bet Championship wins have propelled Valérien Ismaël’s relentless young team into the play-offs with 13 games to play and boy are they ruffling a few feathers. Blackburn are not the only team to have tried to bypass one of the country’s most ferocious pressing units. But opponents have been left looking increasingly frustrated.

    Last week Yann Valery, the Birmingham City full back, said “they don’t play football, they just play long balls,” which as you might imagine amused Barnsley fans no end. Millwall’s Jed Wallace recently told the Not The Top 20 Podcast that he had “never played against a team like that at any level of football. The way they play is mental,” he said. Valery’s manager, Gary Rowett, even referenced John Beck’s notorious Cambridge United team — of which he was a member — in the early Nineties. “Good luck to them,” he added, rather more magnanimously than others.

    However this is no flash in the pan. Since Ismaël took charge of Barnsley, who were winless after their opening seven games, on October 27, only leaders Norwich City have won more points. Yes, Barnsley play more long passes, and passes into the final third, than any other team in the division — though Ismaël prefers the term “vertical football” — but as the former Bayern Munich defender says there is a difference between playing direct and playing “direct with purpose” and the purpose for Barnsley, of course, is the opportunity to unleash their targeted press.

    Barnsley average more “pressed sequences”, one Opta metric which measures the intensity of a team’s pressing in the opponent’s third, than any team in the top two tiers of English football. Only Liverpool and Manchester City average more “high turnovers”. Opponents do not know how to cope and, at a time when the Championship schedule is more relentless than ever, Barnsley are boxing clever. They have made more substitutes (135) than any other team, and the maximum five changes in each of their last seven victories — including the entire front three — to maintain the intensity of their press.

    “We’re fit lads, we can run all day, and when you’re tired you keep going, keep going,” Barnsley forward Conor Chaplin says, “but then someone else is brought on, and they’ll keep going as well.” The result, Chaplin adds, is a team in which every player is fully invested, because they’re aware that, whether from the start or bench, they will have a part to play.”

    On the face of things Oakwell, with its main stand filled with wooden seats and the red brick wall that doubles as a urinal, has not changed an awful lot since Danny Wilson last led Barnsley to the Premier League in 1997. Yet since a takeover in 2017 by Chien Lee, Paul Conway and Billy Beane of the Pacific Media Group, Barnsley have become the epitome of a modern, data-led football club, with a clear vision and style of play that informs every decision — from the boardroom down to the academy.

    Ismaël is Barnsley’s third head coach with roots in German or Austrian football in the space of 2½ years. A commitment to pressing informed all three decisions. Like Ismaël’s predecessors, Daniel Stendel and Gerhard Struber, the 45-year-old honed his philosophy developing young players in Germany — indeed, he worked with Stendel at Hannover, coaching the club’s under-19s while Stendel led the under-23s — and had only a little experience as a head coach.

    Barnsley, though, looked beyond the Frenchman’s turbulent spells as head coach of Wolfsburg, Nürnburg and the Greek club Appollon Smyrnis, and his dismissal by the Austrian club LASK last summer after leading them to the last 16 of the Europa League. As a player, the classy defender won the German league and cup double with both Werder Bremen and Bayern Munich. A ten month spell in the Premier League with Crystal Palace — for whom he became the club’s £2.75 million record signing from Strasbourg in 1998 — came too early at the age of 22, he says, but a return to England as a coach has always been an ambition and his impact has been remarkable.

    “I just try to show the players how good they are, to speak straight, to show them if something is going right or wrong,” Ismaël says. “The most important thing for any player is to play with courage and show their quality, because that’s why you want to do the job. They have, all the time, the purpose to discover their greatness. You have to give everything to see what you can achieve in your life.”

    Barnsley always recruit with development in mind but this season the improvement of several players has been extraordinary. Alex Mowatt, a classy left-footed former Leeds United midfielder, was sent on loan to Oxford United in 2017-18 when Barnsley were last in the Championship but will be one of the most coveted players in the division when his contract expires this summer. Callum Styles — or the “Bury Baggio” — joined from the Shakers in 2018 and the 20-year-old has been one of the division’s stand-out midfielders in his breakthrough season.
     
  5. ronnieGlavinsB@stardSon

    ronnieGlavinsB@stardSon Well-Known Member

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    Mads Andersen, a centre half who arrived from AC Horsens in Denmark 18 months ago, was truly calamitous at times last season, but the 23-year-old has improved to such an extent that the West Stand Bogs Fanzine recently mused on Twitter that “Whatever we’ve done to Mads Andersen is a bigger scientific achievement than owt AstraZeneca have ever done”.

    In all seriousness, the Dane’s partnership in a back three with the outstanding Michael Helik, 25, who has just been called up by Poland, and the Austrian Michael Sollbauer, 30, whose experience proved pivotal to Barnsley’s Championship survival when he arrived mid-way through last season, has contributed to ten clean sheets and 21 fewer goals conceded than at this point last season.

    Barnsley, once again, have the youngest team in the division, with an average starting age of 24 and 132 days — as Doug Kane, who covers the Tykes for the Barnsley Chronicle, pointed out at the weekend, three Birmingham players (George Friend, Lukas Jutkiewicz and Adam Clayton) had made more Championship appearances than all 20 players in Barnsley’s match-day squad combined — but a core of players are a year older and wiser to the challenges of the Championship. “[The players’] Leadership has grown and evolved over the last two seasons,” Dane Murphy, a former DC United player who is the club’s 34-year-old chief executive, said last week. “There is this sort of boyhood mentality, that it’s them against the world, they’re the youngest team and they have to fight for relevance and to show everyone just how good they are. It’s infectious.”

    Murphy says he has banned the P-words: play-offs, promotion and Premier League, and Ismaël does not waver from his focus on the next game, but belief is growing. “We feel it,” Ismaël says. The arrival of Daryl Dike (pronounced “Dee-Kay”), a 20-year-old American striker from Orlando City, and Carlton Morris, 25, who joined from Norwich City, in January have added greater depth, power and pace in attack and eased the goalscoring burden on Cauley Woodrow. Dike’s third goal in the last four games, an absolute rocket against Birmingham City on Saturday, suggested Barnsley have a star on their hands.

    A section of supporters, albeit a diminishing one, still feel a lingering unease about the relationship between the club’s player trading model and its sense of ambition under an ownership group whose stable of clubs include the Danish second-tier team Esbjerg, Nancy in France, Thun in Switzerland and Ostend in Belgium. The decision to sell Barnsley’s three best players — Kieffer Moore, Ethan Pinnock and Liam Lindsay to Wigan Athletic, Brentford and Stoke City for about £7.5 million — after securing promotion from League One in 2019, and replace them with a bunch of rookies, looked as though it had badly backfired until that thrilling denouement at Brentford on the final day of last season. But, much like Brentford, Barnsley are now showing that there is a way of disrupting the Championship orthodoxy of boom and bust and huge financial losses through a unity of vision.

    This remarkable run was catalysed, Ismaël says, by Barnsley’s closely fought 1-0 defeat by Chelsea in the FA Cup fifth round last month. “It was a game changer,” he says. “After the game the guys knew that if they could compete like that against Chelsea, they could do it in the Championship. Three days later we won at Brentford, who were 21 games unbeaten. Since then it was all about how to raise the bar, to discover how high we can reach this season.”

    And do Barnsley care what other teams think? “I promise you, we could not care less — we just want three points,” Chaplin, 24, says. “It doesn’t matter what teams think about us, what individual players think about us, what individual managers think about us, as a group we are in such a good place. We know what we want to do. We know how we want to play.”
     
  6. dreamboy3000

    dreamboy3000 Well-Known Member

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    It's been copied and pasted up now. It was offered to me as one free article.
     
  7. Mrs

    MrsHallsToffeerolls Well-Known Member

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    We are the times.
     
  8. Marlon

    Marlon Well-Known Member

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  9. Brush

    Brush Well-Known Member

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    Clearly no longer under the radar...:(:(
     
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  10. Dan

    DannyWilsonLovechild Well-Known Member

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    Yes. It's true. The ball at times, is just too high for the radar. ;-)
     
  11. Prince of Risborough

    Prince of Risborough Well-Known Member

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    This is the kind of coverage we used to get .....um, let me think......oh yes, 1997-1998.
     
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  12. 55&counting

    55&counting Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for posting!! / copying and pasting!!
     
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  13. Gordon Owen

    Gordon Owen Well-Known Member

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    He must have logged on here 12 months ago...


    A section of supporters, albeit a diminishing one, still feel a lingering unease about the relationship between the club’s player trading model and its sense of ambition under an ownership group whose stable of clubs include the Danish second-tier team Esbjerg, Nancy in France, Thun in Switzerland and Ostend in Belgium. The decision to sell Barnsley’s three best players — Kieffer Moore, Ethan Pinnock and Liam Lindsay to Wigan Athletic, Brentford and Stoke City for about £7.5 million — after securing promotion from League One in 2019, and replace them with a bunch of rookies, looked as though it had badly backfired until that thrilling denouement at Brentford on the final day of last season.
     
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  14. ley

    leythtyke Well-Known Member

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    Like to think we won’t get relegated this season like in 97/98.
     
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  15. Gordon Owen

    Gordon Owen Well-Known Member

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    Long balls this season..

    Screenshot_20210310-130538_Chrome.jpg
     
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  16. Barnsley Chopin

    Barnsley Chopin Well-Known Member

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    Same Gregor Robertson who played for Chezzy?
     
  17. 55&counting

    55&counting Well-Known Member

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    Really good read thanks Dreamboy & RGBS........two statements from the piece really illustrate the debate which has raged (and continues to rage) on this Board:

    "Yet since a takeover in 2017 by Chien Lee, Paul Conway and Billy Beane of the Pacific Media Group, Barnsley have become the epitome of a modern, data-led football club, with a clear vision and style of play that informs every decision — from the boardroom down to the academy."

    A section of supporters, albeit a diminishing one, still feel a lingering unease about the relationship between the club’s player trading model and its sense of ambition under an ownership group.....But, much like Brentford, Barnsley are now showing that there is a way of disrupting the Championship orthodoxy of boom and bust and huge financial losses through a unity of vision.

    I know which side of that debate I'm on. Sound management. Adhering to FFP. Clear objectives communicated throughout the club. Commitment and buy-in from all employees from top to bottom. Development of young talent. Good succession planning. Astute recruitment policy..........

    COYR.

     
  18. Fon

    Fonzie Well-Known Member

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    It's a shame there's no mention of the change in transfer approach and subsequent success of this - after the abject failure of the initial transfer business.

    Good article otherwise though.
     
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  19. ade

    ade Well-Known Member

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  20. andytyke

    andytyke Administrator Staff Member Admin

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    Win toneet and Saturday and we’ll be everywhere lol.
     
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