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Remember the Brazilian Ronaldo?
Everyone knew his trick.
Step over, step over, step over… burst to the left. Everyone knew Ronaldo was going to his left. Everyone knew it. And yet no-one could stop him.
Arjen Robben. How many times do lads scoff and tell you how obvious it is that he wants his left foot? But if you try blocking just his left foot, one of two things are going to happen: he’ll go around you on the outside and beat you for pace; or he’s going to just get onto his left anyway.
It’s easy sitting on your arm chair telling people what’s going to happen and what you should do to stop it. The realities are different.
Take Paddy McBrearty.
Donegal stormed into the Ulster semi-final with a blistering attacking display against their local rivals Derry on Sunday. McBrearty did what he’s become accustomed to do nowadays – he scored a shitload.
Eight points he kicked in Celtic Park, five of them from play and, again, you were seeing Donegal working that deadly pattern that frees up their shooters with factory-like routine.
Runners drove at the backline, shooters came around on the loop to fill the space the battering rams had freed up behind them.
Drive at the bodies, loop around
And it’s just a simple pop and shoot
Every time McBrearty got the ball, he was cutting inside onto his left looking to swing a leg at it and he seemed to get space to do it every time despite the bodies back behind the ball.
It seemed that no matter what Brendan Rogers did, McBrearty got the space. He has the frightening acceleration, he has the system that’s freeing him up and almost blocking off a man-marking and then he has the dead-eye accuracy to finish.
On The GAA Hour on Monday, Colm Parkinson and Cian Ward were discussing how to bloody stop him.
“Donegal, when they get down around that 45′, it’s very rarely laboured.” Wooly said.
“It’s always a hand pass and there’s somebody running off the shoulder. And, you know, you hear ‘support play’ and ‘running off the shoulder’ and it can be just thrown out and often it’s just generic analysis where it works for almost every game. But, genuinely, the support play for Donegal is great.
“McBrearty will see somebody approach the 45′ and he’ll be patient, then he just loops back around the outside. Or even they’ll cut across in front of him but he’s cutting at an angle on his left – Brennan’s cutting in on his right – and, because Derry weren’t tuned in enough to this, Donegal got an awful lot of joy cutting in where they can either shoot or they’re cutting across the field where somebody is then coming at a straight line angle and they can pop it off to them and that’s what gets you through a group of bodies.
“I think you’ve got to cut off the angle. When I was a forward, I stopped turning on my right an awful lot because I found that if you’re very obvious at turning on your right and it’s your stronger foot, your man won’t follow behind and around, he’ll just come across at the angle and you’ll be body checked when you turn. The amount of times you can fool a man by just turning on the foot that’s not natural to you.
“This is obvious with Donegal – it’s clearly tactical for their two corner forwards – you have to cut them off at the angle. You have to just let them off – they’re not doing any damage there – and then meet them when they’re coming off the loop.”
Ward said the extra defenders need to take more responsibility.
“You know it’s going to happen as an opposing team – this is a very obvious trend, McBrearty likes to do it. So the onus is on the cover defenders coming back, that McBrearty is the danger. McBrearty is coming across onto his left foot because he’s one-footed so the cover defender should know that he’s coming across into the centre here on the loop, ‘I can stand in this zone knowing McBrearty’s going to come right in to meet me.’
“Obviously the marker has a job but the cover defender needs to know that this is the danger man so we need to block off where he wants to go.”
Listen to the full Derry v Donegal analysis below from 46:40.
