Culture
How long passes by goalkeepers went from practical to tactical
The death of the long ball has been frequently pronounced as football has evolved in the past few years.
Playing out from the back has become the standard. Direct teams are the anomaly rather than the norm.
The logical tactical evolution after that was the rise of the high press, followed by attempts to deliberately lure the press to exploit spaces in behind those opposition players doing the pressing.
During that time, teams have been playing shorter passes from the back. Goalkeepers are no longer habitually launching long balls as far up the pitch as they can. Instead, they play a key role in their team’s build-up phase, a trend best illustrated by the decline of the long ball in Europe’s top leagues, especially the Premier League.
Goalkeepers in England’s top flight have been playing fewer long balls. Since the start of the 2018-19 Premier League season, the percentage of goalkeeper passes played long — defined as balls that travel at least 32m (35 yards) — has been decreasing year on year, dropping from 69 per cent to under half in that six-year period.
The move towards playing shorter passes means ’keepers have increasingly been required to possess a different skill set. Technical ability on the ball has become a necessity, leading to a focus on developing goalkeepers who are good with their feet under pressure.
This increased technical quality of goalkeepers, and the rise of aggressive pressing, have led to teams maximising long passes to exploit spaces upfield.
“When you play teams against man to man, the man free is the ‘keeper,” said Pep Guardiola after his Manchester City side’s 3-0 away win against Burnley at the start of last season. “That’s why you have to use this alternative.”
In the second half of that game, City exploited Burnley’s man-marking by isolating striker Erling Haaland and using goalkeeper Ederson to play long passes to him. Ederson completed 16 of his 28 long passes at Turf Moor that night — his highest Premier League tally since 2018-19 — and one of those led to the free kick through which City scored their third goal.
Similarly, visitors Brentford tried to press City man-to-man in their Premier League match last month. Again, the City players dropped deeper to drag Brentford defenders out of position, creating space for Haaland to attack and for Ederson to send long passes into.
In this example, Jack Grealish and Savinho retreat to move their markers forward, Sepp van den Berg and Nathan Collins, and isolate Haaland against Ethan Pinnock.
Once the City players attract Brentford’s defenders higher up the pitch, Ederson plays a long ball towards Haaland, who beats Pinnock to score the winner.
“When you isolate Haaland against a central defender, with the quality that we have with Ederson and (backup goalkeeper) Stefan Ortega, it’s a weapon that we have to exploit,” said Guardiola after City’s 2-1 victory that day.
This season has been the third in a row in which City have used Ederson’s long balls towards Haaland to beat man-to-man pressing schemes. Considering the qualities and profiles of the two players, it’s a golden solution.
On the other side of Manchester, Guardiola’s United counterpart Erik ten Hag was never lucky enough to see Andre Onana’s long balls towards Diogo Dalot result in a goal.
Since the beginning of last season, ’keeper Onana has been trying to find Dalot’s runs behind the defence, whether the Portuguese full-back was starting from a narrow infield position or a wider one.
The idea is to wait until Dalot has curved his run beyond the opposition back line before the goalkeeper plays the long ball into space with the other United players vacating that area.
In the 2-1 home win against Brentford this month, Dalot snuck behind Kevin Schade — after Marcus Rashford’s narrow positioning dragged Kristoffer Ajer infield — to attack the space beyond the defence.
Onana perfectly times his long pass, with Dalot still onside…
… but the full-back shoots straight at Mark Flekken.
Liverpool have also been using their goalkeepers’ long-range distribution to execute a specific move.
Alisson and his backup Caoimhin Kelleher have been playing long balls to Mohamed Salah to start an up-back-through passing pattern down their right wing.
Liverpool’s third goal in a 4-1 win against Sevilla in pre-season is an example of how the move works: Alisson goes direct towards Salah and Dominik Szoboszlai makes a third-man run into the space the Egyptian winger has vacated, even before the latter gets the ball back to Diogo Jota, who then finds the Hungarian midfielder’s run.
Salah has received 42 per cent of Liverpool goalkeepers’ completed long passes in the Premier League this season, a stark increase compared to the previous six campaigns. New head coach Arne Slot is turning him into a direct outlet.
It’s important to remember that this is not just a case of goalkeepers launching their kicks forward with no purpose. The idea is to have a specific routine that maximises your chance of scoring a goal.
Arsenal’s David Raya has played 56 per cent of his passes long in the Premier League so far this season — only Nottingham Forest, Everton and Wolverhampton Wanderers’ goalkeepers have gone direct more frequently. But Arsenal aren’t just lumping the ball forward for the sake of it. Raya’s long passes are mainly targeted towards Kai Havertz near the right touchline, with the other Arsenal players in position to try to then win the second ball.
Since Raya and Havertz joined Arsenal in summer 2023, the Germany forward has received as many of the Spain goalkeeper’s completed long passes as the rest of the team combined in the Premier League (102 of 204). The next highest receivers on the list are Gabriel Jesus and Gabriel Martinelli, with just 17 each.
Football’s evolution in recent years has turned goalkeepers’ long balls into a tool to attack space and progress up the pitch.
More emphasis on build-up play has favoured technically sound ‘keepers, while also leading to the rise of aggressive pressing and higher defensive lines. Goalkeepers can target specific areas and team-mates to bypass that press and attack the space it inevitably creates.
Numerically, long balls played by ’keepers are in decline but tactically, they are more important than ever.
(Top photo: Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
-
New Mexico2 minutes agoValencia County first responders busy with UTV crashes
-
North Carolina7 minutes agoSuspect seen on North Carolina camera after shooting Virginia deputies
-
North Dakota14 minutes agoMotorcyclist seriously injured in crash south of Devils Lake
-
Ohio17 minutes agoLarge police presence breaks up fight at Boardman Park
-
Oklahoma22 minutes ago
PHOTOS: NCAA Regionals vs. Oklahoma (5/31)
-
Oregon29 minutes agoSuspect in custody, shelter-in-place lifted after shooting investigation in Sandy, police say
-
Pennsylvania32 minutes agoLuzerne County Sports Hall of Fame induction June 7 at Mohegan Pennsylvania
-
Rhode Island37 minutes agoLiz McGraw Cries Revealing Unaired Details From Her and Jo-Ellen’s RHORI Clash (EXCLUSIVE) | Bravo
