Why Mourinho's Chelsea Dominated The Premier League | RETRO TACTICS | FourFourTwo - video Dailymotion

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RETRO TACTICS EPISODE 1 Team: Chelsea FC Manager: Jose Mourinho Era: 04/05 - 05/06  In the first installment of our Retro Tactics series, we look at the almost invincible Chelsea team of 2004-2006, when incoming manager Jose Mourinho led them to consecutive Premier League titles in his first two seasons at the club.  Key Players: John Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Claude Makelele, Eidur Gudjohnsen, Petr Cech.  Honours: Premier League, FA Cup, League Cup, Community Shield.

Transcript

00:00Hello everybody, Adam Cleary from 442 here and welcome to the first installment of Retro Tactics.

00:16We've been wanting to do something like this for a little while and at the time of recording it's

00:21still somehow an international break, nothing else is going on so we thought why not. So this,

00:27this right here is Jose Mourinho's Chelsea from about 2004 to 2006. It is the most defensively

00:36solid, mathematically speaking, team the Premier League has ever seen. It won back-to-back

00:41championships, it won FA Cups, it won League Cups, it made the club's first ever serious forays

00:46into the latter stages of the Champions League. It is probably the most tactively innovative team

00:53the Premier League had ever seen. Alright, so a little bit of background, Chelsea obviously

00:58already had money by the time Mourinho had come in, Ranieri had finished second and he'd also got

01:03to the semi-finals of the Champions League the season before but they just, they weren't quite

01:07cemented as one of the top, top clubs in the division. It was all very new to them but then

01:12as everybody knows, Jose Mourinho entered the fray and just honestly pretty much overnight

01:17transformed the club to having the sort of stature that it still has today. To be one of the big four

01:23in the Premier League, to be one of the top six, all these terms, they didn't really exist until then

01:28but they did pretty much the second he walked in that door.

01:32I'm European champion so I'm not one of the bottle, I think I'm a special one.

01:39And the way he did that was with this, this team, this system, this formation, these players, he gave

01:46the Premier League several things it had never seen before and it took them two full seasons

01:52to work out how to do anything with it. Now obviously across two seasons loads of players come in and out,

01:58loads of players play very important roles even within the same system so we've got it like this

02:02but it could just as easily be Damian Duff in either of these wide positions, Essien and Thiago,

02:07they were both really important as that other eight alongside Frank Lampard.

02:11Wayne Bridge and William Gallas, they both had about a season as the first choice left back in

02:15this system and you could, people forget, but you could have Ida Goodjohnson in there instead of

02:22Didier Drogba. In fact, Ida Goodjohnson is a player we're going to talk about more in a little bit.

02:28But the key to all this really, the man who literally invented a position for himself based on this team

02:33is Claude McAuley. He sat in this sitting number six role at the base of a 4-3-3, something you see

02:40all the time now but back then was just mind-blowing to English teams. And that's because,

02:47believe it or not, given the name of this YouTube channel and the magazine it produces content for,

02:52this country was really obsessed with 4-4-2 back then. Like some teams would play it as a diamond,

02:59some players would have a holding midfielder, an attacking midfielder, some players would have a 4-4-1-1

03:04or occasionally you might even see a back three every now and then. But by and large, in the Premier League,

03:09most weeks, most teams had some kind of 4-4-2. And what that meant was they always had two central

03:17midfielders. And we could do a whole other video on why that was, but it's fairly common sense. It gives

03:22you great balance across the pitch. You have two players in pretty much every single position. You've got

03:27two players on the flanks, you've got two players in central defence, you've got two players in the

03:30middle of the pitch, you've got two players up front. There are twos everywhere, so you're never

03:34lopsided and it's not easy to break you down. And even in Mourinho's own words, the whole reason he

03:39played this system was because the 4-4-2 was so popular in the Premier League. Like he's literally

03:44quoted as saying, if I have a triangle in midfield, I always have an advantage against a pure 4-4-2

03:50where the central midfielders are side by side. And that's precisely what Makaleli was for.

03:55Petr Cech, one of the greatest goalkeepers in the history of the Premier League, couldn't kick,

03:59couldn't really distribute the ball well. That's not what the game was about then. There was no

04:02onus on the goalkeeper to be able to find players across the pitch with his kicking. So when Chelsea

04:07wanted to play out from the back, which they had to against most teams who were sitting off them,

04:11the centre-backs would then, they would split a little bit, Terry and Carvalho. The full-backs

04:15would push slightly further up and Makaleli would drop to about here. And he would find one of these

04:20three players with his first kick out every single time. Now another thing that was totally

04:25innovative back there was Terry and Carvalho. You tended to at most have one sort of ball-playing

04:31centre-back, but that wasn't really a defender's job back then. They were a luxury to have, but you

04:36wanted someone who could head, kick, tackle, mark, do all the conventional things. And here in this

04:41Chelsea side, you had two ball-playing centre-backs. Now John Terry does not get enough credit for his

04:47on-the-ball ability because the game rapidly caught up with him and then surpassed him during his career.

04:52But at this point in 0-4, 0-5, 0-6, he was so far ahead of the curve in what he could do in

04:58possession. Both he and Carvalho would receive the ball in this sort of area and if the opposition

05:02sat off them, they would be free to carry this forward up the pitch and help the rest of the

05:07team advance. But if the opposition didn't sit off them and try to challenge them for that ball,

05:11then it would almost always go into Makaleli and that's when they would have problems. And this is

05:17the whole idea with having three players in central midfield because it gives you five players in this

05:21area. So if you imagine this is some other team, they're two centre-forwards, they've gone and closed

05:26down Terry and Carvalho so they can't play the ball forward. That leaves you with two central midfielders

05:31marking Chelsea's other two central midfielders. Now assuming either Terry, Carvalho or Cech can then

05:37get that ball into Makaleli, what do you do? These two don't really want to start chasing back because

05:42that's no way to defend. Makaleli's just free to go through and you're running after him. And if one

05:47of these two then decide to move forward, well now you've got a free man in central midfield. Pretty

05:52much one of the few places on the pitch you can't ever afford to leave a spare man. All right, okay,

05:57so maybe what you do is you play like a 4-4-1-1 instead then. So you can put a player in this pocket

06:01here to stop Makaleli getting on the ball. All right, you've kind of matched them up but now

06:05you can't really defend against Terry and Carvalho, two ball-playing centre-backs who will very happily

06:11then just find players further up the pitch. Oh but wait, hang on, you've got wingers haven't you

06:16and they're kind of in this area of the pitch. So maybe what you do is you say one of your midfielders

06:20can push onto Makaleli when he gets onto the ball but one of your wide men he's got to then tuck

06:26inside to mark the other central midfielder thus not leaving you exposed. That'll work, won't it?

06:31Well again, no because now you've left one of Chelsea's full-backs free and in this Chelsea system

06:35they were also doing something very innovative with full-backs. Like if you don't remember this period in

06:41football, this is going to sound ridiculous but prior to Mourinho coming into the Premier League

06:45full-backs as standard virtually did no attacking. They were still seen as defenders. Like yes,

06:51there were some that were ahead of their time and would do this job in certain teams but

06:54it wasn't really seen as part of their job spec to get down the line and get up the pitch. But in

07:00this Mourinho side that's what he instructed them to do. He wanted them to physically carry the ball

07:05up the wing and on occasion provide the width for sort of an attacking front five. And why would

07:10you have them provide the wing though when you've got these two excellent wide attackers

07:13in a 4-3-3? Surely they should be nice and wide. And yes, they were and part of their job was to

07:19get to the byline like traditional wingers were doing and to put crosses onto Drogba's head. But

07:23also, Mourinho would quite often invert his wingers. He would switch them over mid-game. He would switch

07:28them over several times in the same game and if you found yourself on the side where you weren't on your

07:33strong foot, your job was to then come inside and effectively play along the centre forward. It was

07:39inverted wingers before inverted wingers were really a thing. And if you can picture a winger

07:43inverting on this side, then the full-back making the run to provide the width there and then one

07:48of the number eights, usually Frank Lampard arriving late to support the centre forward, you've got this

07:53really dangerous attacking front five that can be formed several different ways on different sides

07:59of the pitch and is virtually impossible to track the runs of. The only difference between this sort of

08:04front five and the kind of front five that Pep does now is that rather than the defenders

08:07shuffling around into a back three, you'd then have McAuley moving across into the space the full-back

08:13had vacated to always keep that steady four there. And as ridiculous as it looks, Chelsea would quite

08:19often end up in situations where they still had a full-back four and then one player, either Thiago or

08:25Essien sort of patrolling this space and then just five attackers. And this is why it like genuinely bugs me

08:31when I hear this Chelsea team being referred to as like a defensive, stable, quite boring outfit. Like

08:38yes, they only conceded 15 goals and that's incredible, but that was mostly because they

08:43dominated the ball so much, not because they were negative. They scored something like 74-75 goals

08:49that season. They were second only behind Arsenal. Like they were a forward-thinking attacking side. They

08:54created loads of chances. But the reason this was so hard to defend against though is we have sort of

08:59formed this front five using the left-hand side of the pitch, right? So we've got McAuley here. He

09:04shuffled across, but that's because the full-back went up that way and that winger inverted and then

09:09that number eight, etc, etc. But they would do that on the opposite side just as freely. Like Mourinho

09:16didn't play with two overlapping full-backs and two inverted wingers. He would only play with one at a

09:23time. But during the course of the game, they would change which side that was happening from. So just

09:27imagine it again over on this side this time. The winger he inverts comes across to about here. That

09:32full-back then gets all the way up and provides the width. This number eight now gets into the front

09:36five. McAuley then sweeps across to the right-hand side to cover that space and you've got the exact

09:41same shape all over again. So long story short here with McAuley as the pivot in the base of a three

09:47and full-back that could come at you overlapping from each side and wingers that could both invert and

09:52get to the byline to provide their own width. And two separate number eights who were really happy getting up

09:56front with Drogba. Chelsea in their build-up phase when they were creating attacks could either go

10:02through the middle because they had numerical superiority or they could go down the flanks

10:07where they could hurt you in so many different ways. And again I'll just keep saying this. Ball

10:13playing centre-backs, an overlapping full-back, inverting wingers and three players in midfield.

10:19You just see that every single game now but back in 04 my friends nobody had a f***ing clue what was

10:27going on. But for all the innovating Jose Mourinho did, for all the things you'd never seen before,

10:32there was one thing Chelsea were absolutely brilliant at which was quintessentially British. And that was

10:39when the situation called for it, they could go route one better than anyone in the league.

10:45Czech to Drogba was a weapon all its own. And if you've been sitting there doing the maths,

10:52counting on your fingers, thinking hang on, if they've got numerical superiority in this part

10:56of the pitch, surely that only happens because they've got numerical unsuperiority, which is probably

11:01a word, in that area of a pitch. Because if they were playing 4-4-2, they'd have two wingers and two

11:07strikers, so that's four players and the defence has got four players in it. So now you're at a

11:12disadvantage, surely that's where that should be a problem. But no, my friends, because that is the

11:17beauty of Didier Drogba. He got a lot of criticism in his first two seasons at Chelsea because he

11:24wasn't a prolific goal scorer. He had arrived at a high reputation for a high fete, supposedly the most

11:29ambitious club in the land, and he wasn't bagging them in for fun every single game. But that is not

11:35what made Drogba a world-class player in this team. It was his ability to bully defenders,

11:42to bring his teammates into play. Chelsea scored loads of goals, not because he was the one putting

11:48them in the net, but because he was so important to the system that created them. Now, as we've said

11:53back then, pretty much every team, not all, but pretty much every single team had a back four. So you

11:58can visualise it here. It's easy to see. They are man for man in the wide areas, and theoretically,

12:03they've got an advantage over Drogba. Frank Lampard's main job in this Chelsea side was to

12:07be arriving late into the box to either get on the end of crosses or to offer a pullback option

12:12to be an unmarked threat. And you can see, theoretically, that's really easy. One defender

12:17marks Drogba, and one watches for Lampard's run. So how then, how did Lampard score so many goals

12:25in this team? Well, it's a combination of two things. First of all, that Frank Lampard was

12:29undeniably the best player in the world at the time for timing a late run into the box.

12:36It was just really hard to defend against anyway, but also because this chap here wasn't watching

12:41for Frank Lampard. This chap here was helping to mark Drogba. So often in games, Drogba would

12:47be able to physically tie up both centre-backs, swapping between which one was marking him,

12:52the other never feeling totally confident in passing him on or letting him go, and that would

12:56always create loads of room for Lampard to get in. And it wasn't just Lampard either,

13:01by the way. When you've got wide players who are looking to invert, and you've got a centre-back

13:05who's been drawn away from that area because they're watching Drogba, and a full-back who

13:08doesn't really want to get dragged into cover, then there's a whole area for them to play in.

13:13He was a space-creating machine. And in even more Mike Bassett terms than that, he was always an

13:18option against a high defensive line to just win a flick on and allow either of the wide players

13:24or Lampard to run beyond him into that space. Like, the guy, it's such a classically British

13:29type of centre-forward to have in what's such a, like, innovative European system to play.

13:34Now, you know when you go to a nice hotel and they give you a continental breakfast and it's

13:37all, like, nice little pastries and some jams and stuff and some little cooked meats, right?

13:41Imagine that, just slab a load of peas pudding on it, right? That was Drogba in this system.

13:46But the thing is, it wasn't always Drogba, right? And the reason at the start of the video,

13:50I said we were going to come back to Ida Gudjonsson, is because he's very much like the forgotten

13:55player of this team. Like, maybe not the Chelsea fans, maybe you all remember the contribution he

14:00had to this and how important he was to this Mourinho system. But I think if you asked any

14:04other fan from any other club to, like, rattle off who made the most appearances for Chelsea

14:08in Mourinho's first season, I don't think any of them, any of them would guess Gudjonsson.

14:14And he did. He started 30 Premier League games in Mourinho's first season. In fact, in total

14:19appearances, when you include substitutes, he was the second most used player for Mourinho

14:23that year. Genuinely. Because while he did play up top instead of Drogba in a number of

14:28games, he also played as the other eight in the midfield alongside Frank Lampard. And

14:33he also occasionally played out wide when he was useful in that sort of context. But also,

14:39this is the system Mourinho used to control games in a league that everybody played 4-4-2.

14:44Sometimes, he didn't want to control the game. Sometimes, he would genuinely,

14:49brace himself for this, just play

14:51a 4-4-2. McAlealy would slot in alongside Lampard in the centre of midfield to allow Lampard to use

15:00his frankly very underrated passing range and just general midfield busybody activities, which

15:05you just hardly ever saw at Chelsea, but he could definitely do it. The two wide attackers,

15:10they had played at wingers at their previous clubs. It was the traditional role for their

15:13sort of players back then. And then, just two centre-forwards. They would occasionally just

15:18line up like this. I mean, not against the big sides, and certainly not often, but the reason

15:22Ida Goodjonsson started 30 Premier League games and Drogba still started 18 was because this

15:28was an option. He was very versus Highland, could do loads of different things, but this also was

15:32something they could just do. This meant that Mourinho could simultaneously give the Premier League

15:37something it had never seen before, but also take it on at its own game. And when you've got

15:42those two things all going on at once, you win the league, and you only concede 15 goals in the

15:47process. And then, of course, there's all the other stuff behind it. There's the psychology involved.

15:51There's what a great manager Mourinho was at the time. Like, he instilled this underdog belief in

15:57such a massive club, which was really, really useful. They felt like it was them against the world in

16:01every single game. You read any player from this team's autobiography, and they either literally

16:07say, or figuratively say, I would have died for that man. And they did for, like, two whole seasons.

16:14And that's why I think they're one of the most tactically interesting teams the Premier League

16:18has ever seen. Like, I don't remember a team coming along, playing a particular system, and doing loads

16:23of different things for the very first time, and you still seeing so many of them, 10, 15, getting on

16:30for 20 years later. So yes, if you enjoyed that, and I really, really did, please do consider

16:35subscribing to us here on 442. We're hoping to make these a sort of regular thing. If you saw the David

16:40Beckham video we did off the back of his documentary, that was kind of us little dipping our toes in the

16:44water to see if anything based in the past would do quite well, and it did. So here we are. But if you've

16:49got any suggestions for the kind of teams we should look at in the future, like Man United's treble

16:54winners, Arsenal's Invincibles, Keegan's Entertainers, I'll definitely be doing that. Please do drop them in the

16:59comments as well. And also, if you've got a better name than just Retro Tactics, put that in as well,

17:05because I'll probably use it. In the meantime though, grab me on Twitter, because I just still

17:09call it that, at Adam Cleary, C-L-E-R-Y, Instagram threads, like I'm absolutely everywhere. 442,

17:15all of our socials are in the corner of the video for your clicking pleasure at any time you wish.

17:19But until next time, I'm away to just listen to loads of mid-naughties landfill indie,

17:26because to me, that's what this team sounded like. Bye!

Why Mourinho's Chelsea Dominated The Premier League | RETRO TACTICS | FourFourTwo

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