The Godfather of Football

The next day, the media in Britain, Europe, and even around the world were hyping up the incident that Tottenham Hotspur lost at the Emirates Stadium last night, and the team bus was surrounded and stoned by fans. Ye Qiu's actions also attracted great attention, with mixed reviews, both good and bad.

Early in the morning, many reporters and media gathered outside the gate of the Chigwell Training Base, but they were all blocked at the gate of the training base and were prohibited from entering the training base. While the hype outside was almost going crazy, the training of the first-team players in the Chigwell Training Base was normal.

Because they had just fought a tough battle last night, Tottenham Hotspur did not take any high-intensity training early this morning, but arranged more relaxation and adjustment projects, hoping that the players could recover as soon as possible.

Ye Qiu has never advocated high-intensity and compact training in the dense league process, because in the dense schedule, the physical condition of the players is not very ideal. At this time, it is easy to cause unnecessary injuries to the players. Therefore, unless necessary, his high-intensity training is generally arranged at the beginning of the season.

Mauro Tassotti is an expert in organizing defense. In the past few months since he came to Tottenham Hotspur, he has been conducting research with Ye Qiu. One of the important topics is how to extend his organizational concept of defense to the whole team, and how to complete the construction of the team's defense system through the orderly running and cutting of the whole team from front to back.

At present, Tottenham Hotspur has gradually formed a certain framework, but the effect has not been reflected. On the one hand, there are problems with the players in some positions of the team. For example, the third midfielder is a big weakness. Yaya Toure's performance is good and bad, and he cannot be given an important task for the time being. Davis is already old.

Ye Qiu also admitted his mistakes in the internal meeting of the coaching staff, but everyone knows that it was a mistake, but it cannot be completely attributed to Ye Qiu, because no one can fully grasp the physical and state of the players.

After coming to Tottenham Hotspur, Mauro Tassotti felt that he had made a lot of progress, and many things and ideas became clearer. Among them, he felt that what made him shine the most was Ye Qiu's high requirements for some training details, which had even reached a point of being almost demanding.

Tottenham Hotspur's daily training is ball training, and a lot of links are emphasizing the basic technical details of the players, and a very important link is stopping the ball.

Mauro Tassotti and Van Basten were teammates. He admired Van Basten's stopping ability very much. It was a technical detail full of skills and art. You can't tell in detail how much technology he included in it, but what was presented on the football field was a very delicate stopping action again and again.

Some people say that Van Basten is chic and elegant, while others say that Van Basten is deadly and dangerous, but no matter what he says, it all comes down to one thing, that is, shocking stopping.

Because the North London Derby was played yesterday, this morning's training session was mainly for recovery and adjustment. The players started playing various games, such as monkeys, wall collisions, etc., which are all games that emphasize technical details and have a fast pace. It is said that these games started when Ye Qiu was in Ajax.

During each break, Mullensteen and Moniz will definitely be the busiest people, because they will be the first to go up and tell the group of players who are resting where they made mistakes just now, how to correct them, and even give advice on how to do it better.

In the last half hour, Ye Qiu even arranged a training program centered on stopping the ball. These have become commonplace for everyone in the team in the past period of time. Sometimes Ye Qiu will even draw a small circle and let the players stand in it to stop the ball passed from outside. If they stop outside the circle, it will be considered bad and they will be punished.

The content of the punishment is not tiring, but it is very boring. It is all very basic training of ball stopping details. It is very boring. I believe that it is impossible to see it in the training grounds of other first-line teams, because these are all practiced by players when they are young. To become a professional player, they are basically very strong in this aspect, but Ye Qiu still insists on training in this aspect every day.

But don’t think that Ye Qiu wants to train all players to stop the ball to the extreme. In fact, this is impossible.

Many delicate skills in the field of football are cultivated from childhood. After a certain age, it is basically very difficult to improve them. For example, a professional player in his twenties has poor skills. If he wants to practice to the level of Ronaldinho, he probably won’t be able to practice for a lifetime. He doesn’t even need to be like Ronaldinho. As long as he can reach the first-class level, it is very, very difficult.

This is why the training of technical details is more concentrated in youth training, that is, before the age of 14, because during that period, the players’ technical progress is the fastest. After this age, if you want to improve again, it will be twice the result with half the effort.

Stopping the ball is undoubtedly the most difficult skill to practice, but it is the core of all football technical movements!

Perhaps it can be said that the most important criterion for all top players is stopping the ball.

But stopping the ball is like all football skills. It not only includes the process of how someone passes the ball to you and how you stop the ball at your feet, but also includes many things. For example, for a forward, how does he judge the ball? He then uses the moment of contact with the ball to change the direction of the ball and turn the pass directly into a shot. The forward's stopping and ball feel are both important here. If he is not good at these two aspects, he will I can't grasp the direction and angle of the ball at all.

Mauro Tassotti thought of Van Nistelrooy. This Dutch forward has a very special thing, that is, he is used to stopping the ball and then playing. This is very, very rare among top forwards, because usually these are It is a technique that forwards like Henry and Ronaldo use. For a center who captures murderous opportunities in the penalty area, direct shots like Crespo, Batistuta, and Inzaghi are more likely to be used.

Because direct shooting is often faster and more sudden than shooting after stopping the ball, it is difficult for defensive players to react. Even for many players and coaches, they will try their best to avoid forwards stopping the ball and then shooting, because that can easily delay the shooting. Fighter, miss the best and most suitable opportunity to start.

So why isn't this an issue for Ruud van Nistelrooy?

Mauro Tassotti had studied this problem when he was at AC Milan, but had no results. After coming to Tottenham Hotspur, Ye Qiu gave him the answer, which was Ruud van Nistelrooy's stoppage. .

"If you study Ruud van Nistelrooy's skills carefully, you will definitely find that his stopping has a very important impact on his next kick and shooting action. If he can't stop well, he will not be able to hit the goal, and his stopping will have a very important impact. It’s not about stopping the ball at your feet, it’s about stopping the ball in a pre-set position where you are most comfortable to hit the goal.”

"So when we watch Ruud van Nistelrooy shoot, sometimes it feels like he stops the ball, turns around, and kicks off in one go. The whole action is very coherent. Even in the penalty area, he can use this set of actions very skillfully. And in Stopping the ball, which is a liability for other forwards, has become a skill for him to avoid defensive players."

Van Nistelrooy's shooting percentage is high, why? Because before he shot the ball, he stopped the ball out of the reach of the defensive players, but he was in the most comfortable place. The next kick to hit the goal was naturally easy, and the hit rate was naturally high!

Ye Qiu's words made Mauro Tassotti completely understand why Ye Qiu insists on technical training in stopping the ball and details, because whether it is stopping the ball or other technical details, it must rely on long-term persistence. To ensure that feeling, which is what many people call ball feel.

There is no way to explain ball feel. Only you can understand it. But if you don’t practice it for a long time, it will fade away and keep retreating until a skill that you used to be very familiar with becomes very unfamiliar and unfamiliar. , so why does Beckham have to practice constantly? Because this is the only way to ensure his passing feeling.

Similarly, why Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane and other players kept practicing when they were at their peak is to maintain their unique feel for the ball. Only in this way can they ensure their performance on the court. If you stop, your technical movements will become stiff sooner or later, and your performance will be poor.

Ye Qiu asked Van Persie to improve his physical strength in confrontation. At first, including the players themselves, they didn't understand it very well. But after watching Van Nistelrooy's performance and training, everyone understood because Van Persie has a better and more delicate stoppage than Van Nistelrooy. Ability, and he has imagination and ball-making ability that Ruud van Nistelrooy does not have, but he lacks Ruud van Nistelrooy's physical strength to fight.

Van Nistelrooy dared to stop the ball in the penalty area because he had enough physical strength to support it. Otherwise, if someone else bumped into it, it would be deflected. Why would he stop the ball or hit the goal?

The same goes for other players in the team. Ye Qiu always requires them to train on technical details for at least a certain amount of time every day. For many players, including Gareth Bale, Carroll, Cavani, Ashley? Ye Qiu has given high training requirements to frontcourt players such as Yang, as well as some players in the team who are not very good at stopping the ball.

Performing every technical action with purpose is the core concept of Tottenham Hotspur's football. But for stopping the ball, Ye Qiu particularly emphasizes two points, that is, the one second before stopping the ball and the moment of stopping the ball. One second later.

The first second before stopping the ball means telling all the players that before stopping the ball, they must understand why they are stopping the ball and what to do after stopping the ball. Whether it is passing, dribbling or shooting, all of these must be done before stopping the ball. Think clearly.

The player is required to stop the ball in the last second. The purpose of stopping the ball is not to stop the ball at his feet. This is a misunderstanding of many professional players. The purpose of stopping the ball is to better connect the next move and to achieve continuity. sex.

Being able to stop the ball steadily is the standard for a good player; being able to stop the ball and connect it with your next move is the standard for a first-class player; and when can you practice stopping the ball? When you mix it with other technical moves like flowing water, then you are the best!

Ye Qiu mentioned two players who have played in the Premier League, and both are from Arsenal, namely Bergkamp and Nwankwo Kanu. He believes that these two players have the best stopping skills, and Needless to say about Bergkamp, ​​Kanu would definitely have become one of the top and best strikers if it were not for his heart disease.

Of course, Ye Qiu is also very clear that the top-level ball-stopping skills not only rely on practice, but also on talent and imagination. It is hard to come by chance, but the standard of ball-stopping of first-class players can be practiced.

This is another misunderstanding of football by many people. They think that football is purely based on talent. As everyone knows, football actually relies on practice.

The most important factor in cultivating ball sense is long-term training. Without long-term training, a genius cannot become a genius at all. As long as you can maintain long-term training, ball sense can be accumulated and trained. In the words of Chinese ancestors, practice makes perfect.

Moreover, Ye Qiu constantly asked Moniz and Mullensteen to give tips and polish the players' ball-stopping and technical movements during training. What he asked most was not for every player to become the best ball-stopping master, but for everyone in the team to have a skilled ball-stopping ability, at least to be able to complete the ball-stopping and the next step in a coherent manner.

Mauro Tassotti stood at the training ground, watching the first-team players on the field training under the leadership of the coaching staff. He could feel the progress that the team had made in the past few months, and all the players in the team could also feel it, which was something that others could not understand.

Just like the players' sense of the ball, fans, reporters, and spectators could not see the improvement, but only the players themselves could understand that every time they touched the ball and handled the ball on the field, they could feel whether it was good or bad, whether it was progressing or regressing.

Also because the players clearly saw the progress of themselves and their teammates, even if Tottenham Hotspur's performance was not very ideal now, everyone's hearts were full of confidence and expectations for the future, because they saw that everything was developing and progressing in a good direction.

Mauro Tassotti is also full of expectations for the future of this team. He doesn't know what kind of changes will be brought to the Premier League when a Tottenham Hotspur team with extremely skilled passing and receiving, similar to the golden four midfielders of Manchester United, holding high the banner of offensive football and technical style, and integrating many other elements and styles appears in the Premier League.

Perhaps the most direct and most likely change is to further promote the technicalization of the Premier League and the continentalization of tactics.

With Roland's whistle, the training ended.

But the players on the training ground were not in a hurry to leave, but were discussing some details with the coaching staff and teammates over there. Many people even demonstrated some of the technical moves in person, such as Van Nistelrooy demonstrating the technical details of stopping the ball and turning to shoot to Cavani and Van Persie.

Don't underestimate such a simple technical move, which contains very, very complicated things, such as the ball stopping technique, the length of the legs, the amplitude of the leg swing when exerting force, etc., all of which affect the quality and completion of the player's kick.

Football is a very complex system engineering, so complex that even no one can complete its research with data, because it contains too many things, and any one of them may change everything.

Mauro Tassotti heard that Ye Qiu decided to set up a football research center in the new Theobald training base. He also planned to develop or introduce or develop a series of high-tech training methods in the research center, hoping to help players improve their strength.

This is full of temptation for Mauro Tassotti, who came from AC Milan and experienced the magic of Milan Laboratory, because he really wanted to know what new tricks Ye Qiu would come up with in the research center.

"What are you laughing at?" When Mauro Tassotti couldn't help laughing when thinking about the future prospects, Ye Qiu appeared beside him with a puzzled look on his face.

Mauro Tassotti laughed, "I heard that you had a quarrel with your wife last night."

"Nonsense!" Ye Qiu had a guilty conscience, but he was very hard on the mouth, "Who said that?"

"The Sun!" Mauro Tassotti laughed.

"Fuck the Sun!" Ye Qiu cursed angrily, "Which eye of theirs saw me quarreling with my wife?"

The Sun's reporting style is well-known. It is nothing more than a certain insider's disclosure, or ambiguous words such as speculation, but it uses the sentences before and after to make readers believe it. It's really vulgar!

Mauro Tassotti laughed. Being a celebrity has such a disadvantage. You have to face everything that Ye Qiu is facing now at any time and anywhere. Who makes you a celebrity?

"Boss, it's okay. I'll let Vahiba go to your house and talk to your wife later. It's okay. She will forgive you!" Ribery, this bastard, came out from nowhere, looked like I sympathize with you, walked past Ye Qiu, and threw this sentence.

"I" Ye Qiu was innocent and wanted to defend himself.

But Fanny also walked past him and nodded, "Yes, we all know that it is difficult to admit such a thing, so we can only sympathize with you, but you must cheer up and don't give in to women!" This guy also made a fist-clenching gesture, making Ye Qiu seem to represent the dignity of a man.

But just when Ye Qiu kicked out, he had already run quickly.

"I haven't seen you run so fast on the court!" Ye Qiu angrily cursed Fanny behind his back.

The players around him burst into laughter. If they were on the court or in the training ground, they would be afraid of Ye Qiu, but outside the court, they were not afraid at all, and even dared to make fun of Ye Qiu. In the past, they were only in the player area of ​​the training building, but gradually, after Ribery and other former players of Ye Qiu started, they gradually followed.

Ye Qiu was puzzled and helpless, because he was too young when he was in Ajax, and he got along well with the players. Later, when he came to Chelsea, Maicon and others also brought this trend to Chelsea. Now he has come to Tottenham Hotspur, and Ribery and others have brought it to White Hart Lane. It's really innocent!

But just a week after Ye Qiu almost shouted that he was innocent, Alan Pardew also shouted his innocence when facing the media, and his expression was full of desolation after being devastated.