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.
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.
Category
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SportsTranscript
00:00 *Intro*
00:02 *Intro*
00:04 Hello everybody Adam Cleary from 442 here
00:06 and welcome to the first installment
00:08 I've still got this on, of Retro
00:10 Tactics!
00:12 *Intro*
00:14 *Intro*
00:16 *Intro*
00:18 We've been wanting to do something like this for a little while
00:20 and at the time of recording it's still
00:22 somehow an international break
00:24 nothing else is going on so we thought
00:26 why not? So this, this
00:28 right here is Jose Mourinho's
00:30 Chelsea from about 2004
00:32 to 2006
00:34 It is the most defensively
00:36 solid, mathematically speaking, team
00:38 the Premier League has ever seen
00:40 It won back to back championships
00:42 It won FA Cups, it won League Cups
00:44 It made the club's first ever serious
00:46 forays into the latter
00:48 stages of the Champions League. It is probably
00:50 the most
00:52 tactically innovative team
00:54 the Premier League had ever
00:56 seen. Alright so a little bit of background
00:58 Chelsea obviously already had money by the
01:00 time Mourinho had come in. Ranieri had finished
01:02 second and he'd also got to the
01:04 semifinals of the Champions League the season before
01:06 but they just, they weren't quite
01:08 cemented as one of the top, top
01:10 clubs in the division. It was all very new to them
01:12 but then as everybody knows, Jose Mourinho
01:14 entered the fray and just honestly pretty
01:16 much overnight
01:18 transformed the club to having the sort of
01:20 stature that it still has
01:22 today. To be one of the big four
01:24 in the Premier League, to be one of the top six
01:26 all these terms, they didn't really exist
01:28 until then but they did pretty much
01:30 the second he walked in that door
01:32 I'm European champion so I'm
01:34 not one of
01:36 of the bottle
01:38 I think I'm a special one
01:40 And the way he did that was with
01:42 this, this team, this system
01:44 this formation, these players
01:46 he gave the Premier League several
01:48 things it had never seen before
01:50 and it took them two full
01:52 seasons to work out how to do
01:54 anything with it. Now obviously across
01:56 two seasons loads of players come in
01:58 and out, loads of players play very important roles
02:00 even within the same system so we've got it
02:02 like this but it could just as easily be
02:04 Damien Duff in either of these wide positions
02:06 Essien and Thiago, they were
02:08 both really important as that other eight
02:10 alongside Frank Lampard, Wainbridge
02:12 and William Gallas, they both had about a season
02:14 as the first choice left back in this system
02:16 and you could, people
02:18 forget but you could have
02:20 Ida Good Johnson in there
02:22 instead of Didier Drogba, in fact Ida Good Johnson
02:24 is a player we're going to
02:26 talk about more in a
02:28 little bit. But the key to all this really, the man
02:30 who literally invented a position
02:32 for himself based on this team
02:34 is Claude McAlealy
02:36 he sat in this sitting number
02:38 six role at the base of a 4-3-3
02:40 something you see all the time now
02:42 but back then was
02:44 just mind-blowing to English
02:46 teams. And that's because, believe
02:48 it or not, given the name of this YouTube channel
02:50 and the magazine it produces content for
02:52 this country
02:54 was really obsessed with
02:56 4-4-2 back then. Like some teams
02:58 would play it as a diamond, some players would have a
03:00 holding midfielder, an attacking midfielder
03:02 some players would have a 4-4-1-1
03:04 or occasionally you might even see
03:06 a back three every now and then
03:08 but by and large in the Premier League
03:10 most weeks, most teams had
03:12 some kind of 4-4-2
03:14 and what that meant was they always had
03:16 two central
03:18 midfielders. Now we could do a whole other video on why
03:20 that was but it's fairly common sense
03:22 it gives you great balance across the pitch
03:24 you have two players in pretty much
03:26 every single position. You've got two players on the
03:28 flanks, you've got two players in central defence
03:30 you've got two players in the middle of the pitch, you've got two players
03:32 up front. There are twos everywhere
03:34 so you're never lopsided and it's not
03:36 easy to break you down. And even in
03:38 Mourinho's own words, the whole reason he
03:40 played this system was because the 4-4-2 was
03:42 so popular in the Premier League
03:44 he literally quoted as saying
03:46 "If I have a triangle in midfield
03:48 I always have an advantage against
03:50 a pure 4-4-2 where the central
03:52 midfielders are side by side."
03:54 And that's precisely what McAlealy was for. Like Petr Cech
03:56 one of the greatest goalkeepers in the history of the Premier League
03:58 couldn't kick, couldn't really
04:00 distribute the ball well. That's not what the game
04:02 was about then. There was no onus on the goalkeeper
04:04 to be able to find players across the pitch
04:06 with his kicking. So when Chelsea
04:08 wanted a play out from the back, which they had to against most
04:10 teams who were sitting off them, the centre-backs
04:12 would split a little bit, Terry and Carvalho
04:14 the full-backs would push slightly further up
04:16 and McAlealy would drop to about here
04:18 and he would find one of these
04:20 three players with his first kick out
04:22 every single time. Now another thing
04:24 that was totally innovative back there was
04:26 Terry and Carvalho. You tended
04:28 to at most have one
04:30 sort of ball-playing centre-back
04:32 but that wasn't really a defender's job
04:34 back then. They were a luxury to have but you
04:36 wanted someone who could head, kick, tackle
04:38 mark, do all the conventional things
04:40 and here in this Chelsea side
04:42 you had two ball-playing
04:44 centre-backs. Now John Terry does not get
04:46 enough credit for his on-the-ball ability because
04:48 the game rapidly caught up with him
04:50 and then surpassed him during his career
04:52 but at this point in '04-'05-'06
04:54 he was so far ahead
04:56 of the curve in what he could do in
04:58 possession. Both he and Carvalho would receive
05:00 the ball in this sort of area and if the opposition
05:02 sat off them, they would be free
05:04 to carry this forward up the
05:06 pitch and help the rest of the team advance.
05:08 But if the opposition didn't sit off
05:10 them and try to challenge them for that ball, then it
05:12 would almost always go into McAlealy
05:14 and that's when they would have problems.
05:16 And this is the whole idea with having
05:18 three players in central midfield because it gives you
05:20 five players in this area.
05:22 So if you imagine this is some other team
05:24 they're two centre-forwards, they've
05:26 gone and closed down Terry and Carvalho so they
05:28 can't play the ball forward. That leaves you with
05:30 two central midfielders
05:32 marking Chelsea's other two
05:34 central midfielders. Now assuming either Terry
05:36 Carvalho or Cech can then get that
05:38 ball into McAlealy, what
05:40 do you do? These two don't really want to start
05:42 chasing back because that's no way to
05:44 defend. McAlealy's just free to go through when you're
05:46 running after him. And if one of these two then
05:48 decide to move forward, well now
05:50 you've got a free man in central midfield.
05:52 Pretty much one of the few places on the pitch you
05:54 can't ever afford to leave a
05:56 spare man. Alright, okay, so maybe what you do is
05:58 you play like a 4-4-1-1 instead
06:00 then so you can put a player in this pocket
06:02 here to stop McAlealy getting on the ball.
06:04 Alright, you've kind of matched them up but now
06:06 you can't really defend against
06:08 Terry and Carvalho, two ball-playing
06:10 centre-backs who will very happily then
06:12 just find players further up the pitch.
06:14 Oh, but wait, hang on, you've got wingers, haven't
06:16 you? And they're kind of in this area of the pitch.
06:18 So maybe what you do is you say
06:20 one of your midfielders can push on to McAlealy
06:22 when he gets on to the ball but one of
06:24 your wide men, he's got to then tuck
06:26 inside to mark the other central midfielder
06:28 thus not leaving you exposed.
06:30 That'll work, won't it? Well again, no, because
06:32 now you've left one of Chelsea's full-backs
06:34 free and in this Chelsea system
06:36 they were also doing something very innovative
06:38 with full-backs. Like, if
06:40 you don't remember this period in football, this is going to
06:42 sound ridiculous, but prior to Mourinho
06:44 coming into the Premier League, full-backs
06:46 as standard virtually
06:48 did no attacking, they were still
06:50 seen as defenders. Like, yes, there were some
06:52 that were ahead of their time and would do this job
06:54 in certain teams but it wasn't really
06:56 seen as part of their job spec to
06:58 get down the line and get up the pitch.
07:00 But in this Mourinho side, that's what he
07:02 instructed them to do. He wanted them to physically
07:04 carry the ball up the wing and
07:06 on occasion, provide the width
07:08 for sort of an attacking front five. And
07:10 why would you have them provide the wing though when you've got
07:12 these two excellent wide attackers in a
07:14 4-3-3? Surely they should be
07:16 nice and wide and yes, they were and part
07:18 of their job was to get to the byline like
07:20 traditional wingers were doing and to put
07:22 crosses on to Drogba's head but also
07:24 Mourinho would quite often invert
07:26 his wingers. He would switch them over
07:28 mid-game. He would switch them over several times
07:30 in the same game and if you found yourself
07:32 on the side where you weren't on your strong
07:34 foot, your job was to then
07:36 come inside and effectively play along
07:38 the centre forward. It was inverted
07:40 wingers before inverted wingers were really
07:42 a thing. And if you can picture a winger inverting
07:44 on this side, then the full-back making
07:46 the run to provide the width there and then one
07:48 of the number eights, usually Frank Lampard
07:50 arriving late to support the centre forward,
07:52 you've got this really dangerous
07:54 attacking front five that can be formed
07:56 several different ways
07:58 on different sides of the pitch and
08:00 is virtually impossible to track
08:02 the runs of. The only difference between this sort
08:04 of front five and the kind of front five that Pep
08:06 does now is that rather than the defenders
08:08 shuffling around into a back three, you'd
08:10 then have McAlealy moving across into
08:12 the space the full-back had vacated
08:14 to always keep that steady four
08:16 there. And as ridiculous as it looks,
08:18 Chelsea would quite often end up in situations
08:20 where they still had a
08:22 full-back four and then one
08:24 player, either Thiago or Essien, sort of
08:26 patrolling this space and then just
08:28 five attackers. And this is why
08:30 it genuinely bugs me when
08:32 I hear this Chelsea team being referred to
08:34 as a defensive, stable,
08:36 quite boring outfit.
08:38 Like, yes, they only conceded 15
08:40 goals and that's incredible, but that was
08:42 mostly because they dominated
08:44 the ball so much, not because they were negative.
08:46 They scored something like 74,
08:48 75 goals that season.
08:50 They were second only behind Arsenal.
08:52 Like, they were a forward-thinking
08:54 attacking side. They created loads
08:56 of chances. But the reason this was so hard
08:58 to defend against, though, is we have sort of formed
09:00 this front five using the left-hand
09:02 side of the pitch, right? So we've got
09:04 McAlealy here, he's shuffled across, but that's
09:06 because the full-back went up that way and
09:08 that winger inverted and then that number
09:10 eight, etc, etc. But they would do that
09:12 on the opposite side
09:14 just as freely. Like,
09:16 Mourinho didn't play with two
09:18 overlapping full-backs and two
09:20 inverted wingers. He would only play
09:22 with one at a time. But during
09:24 the course of the game, they would change
09:26 which side that was happening from. So just imagine
09:28 it again, over on this side this time,
09:30 the winger he inverts comes across to about here.
09:32 That full-back then gets all the way up
09:34 and provides a width. This number eight now
09:36 gets into the front five. McAlealy then
09:38 sweeps across to the right-hand side to cover that
09:40 space and you've got the exact same
09:42 shape all over again. So,
09:44 long story short here, with McAlealy as the
09:46 pivot in the base of a three and full-backs
09:48 who could come at you overlapping from each
09:50 side and wingers that could both invert
09:52 and get to the byline to provide their own width
09:54 and two separate number eights who were
09:56 really happy getting up front with Drogba.
09:58 Chelsea, in their build-up phase
10:00 when they were creating attacks, could either
10:02 go through the middle because they had numerical
10:04 superiority or they could
10:06 go down the flanks where
10:08 they could hurt you in so many
10:10 different ways. And again, I'll
10:12 just keep saying this, ball-playing
10:14 centre-backs, an overlapping full-back,
10:16 inverting wingers and three
10:18 players in midfield. You just see
10:20 that every single game now
10:22 but back in '04, my
10:24 friends, nobody had a f***ing
10:26 clue what was
10:28 going on. But for all the innovating Jose
10:30 Mourinho did, for all the things you'd never
10:32 seen before, there was one thing Chelsea
10:34 were absolutely brilliant
10:36 at which was quintessentially
10:38 British and that was when the situation
10:40 called for it, they could go
10:42 route one better than anyone
10:44 in the league. Check
10:46 to Drogba was a
10:48 weapon all its own. And if
10:50 you've been sitting there doing the maths,
10:52 counting on your fingers, thinking, hang on, if they've
10:54 got numerical superiority in this
10:56 part of the pitch, surely that only happens
10:58 because they've got numerical
11:00 unsuperiority, which is probably a word,
11:02 in that area of a pitch. Because
11:04 if they were playing 4-4-2,
11:06 they'd have two wingers and two strikers, so
11:08 that's four players and the defence has got
11:10 four players in it. So now,
11:12 you're at a disadvantage. Surely that's where
11:14 that should be a problem. But, no
11:16 my friends, because that is the beauty
11:18 of Didier Drogba. He got
11:20 a lot of criticism in his
11:22 first two seasons at Chelsea because he
11:24 wasn't a prolific goal scorer.
11:26 He had arrived with a high reputation
11:28 for a high fee to supposedly the most ambitious
11:30 club in the land and he wasn't
11:32 bagging them in for fun every
11:34 single game. But that is not what made
11:36 Drogba a world-class
11:38 player in this team. It was his ability
11:40 to bully
11:42 defenders, to bring his teammates
11:44 into play. Chelsea scored loads
11:46 of goals, not because he was the one putting
11:48 them in the net, but because he was so
11:50 important to the system that
11:52 created them. Now, as we've said, back then
11:54 pretty much every team, not all, but pretty much
11:56 every single team had a
11:58 back four. So you can visualise it here.
12:00 It's easy to see. They are man for man in the
12:02 wide areas and theoretically, they've
12:04 got an advantage over Drogba. Frank Lampard's
12:06 main job in his Chelsea side was to be
12:08 arriving late into the box to
12:10 either get on the end of crosses or to offer
12:12 a pullback option to be an under-marked
12:14 threat. And you can see, theoretically,
12:16 that's really easy. One defender, Mark
12:18 Drogba, and one watches for Lampard's
12:20 run. So how then, how
12:22 did Lampard score
12:24 so many goals in this team?
12:26 Well, it's a combination of two things.
12:28 First of all, that Frank Lampard was
12:30 undeniably the best player
12:32 in the world at the time for
12:34 timing a late run into the box.
12:36 It was just really hard to defend against anyway.
12:38 But also, because this chap
12:40 here wasn't watching for Frank
12:42 Lampard. This chap here was
12:44 helping to mark Drogba. So often
12:46 in games, Drogba would be able to
12:48 physically tie up both centre-backs,
12:50 swapping between which one was marking
12:52 him, the other never feeling totally
12:54 confident in passing him on or letting him go.
12:56 And that would always create loads
12:58 of room for Lampard to get
13:00 in. And it wasn't just Lampard either,
13:02 by the way. When you've got wide players who are looking to
13:04 invert, and you've got a centre-back who's been drawn
13:06 away from that area because they're watching
13:08 Drogba, and a full-back who doesn't really want to get dragged
13:10 in the cover, then there's a whole area
13:12 for them to play. And he was a space
13:14 creating machine. And in even
13:16 more Mike Bassett terms than that,
13:18 he was always an option against a high
13:20 defensive line to just win
13:22 a flick on and allow either of the wide players
13:24 or Lampard to run beyond him
13:26 into that space. Like, the guy
13:28 had such a classically British type of
13:30 centre-forward to have, and what such an
13:32 innovative European system to play.
13:34 Like, you know when you go to a nice hotel and they give you a
13:36 continental breakfast and it's all like nice little
13:38 pastries and some jams and stuff
13:40 and some little cooked meats, right? Imagine that,
13:42 just slab a load of peas pudding on it,
13:44 right? That was Drogba in this system.
13:46 Beautiful. The thing is, it wasn't
13:48 always Drogba, right? And the reason
13:50 at the start of the video I said we were going to come back
13:52 to Idagod Jonsson is because he's very much
13:54 like the forgotten player
13:56 of this team. Like, maybe not the Chelsea
13:58 fans, maybe you all remember the contribution
14:00 he had to this and how important he was
14:02 to this Mourinho system, but I think if you asked any
14:04 other fan from any other club
14:06 to like, rattle off who made the most
14:08 appearances for Chelsea in Mourinho's
14:10 first season, I don't think
14:12 any of them, any of them would guess
14:14 Good Jonsson. And he did, he started 30
14:16 Premier League games in Mourinho's
14:18 first season. In fact, in total appearances
14:20 when you include substitutes, he was the
14:22 second most used player for Mourinho
14:24 that year. Genuinely. Because while he did
14:26 play up top instead of Drogba in a
14:28 number of games, he also played
14:30 as the other eight in the midfield
14:32 alongside Frank Lampard. And he also
14:34 occasionally played out wide when
14:36 he was useful in that sort of context.
14:38 But also, this is the system
14:40 Mourinho used to control games
14:42 in a league that everybody played 4-4-2.
14:44 Sometimes, he didn't
14:46 want to control the game. Sometimes, he
14:48 would genuinely, brace yourself for
14:50 this, just play
14:52 a 4-4-2.
14:56 Makaleli would slot in alongside Lampard
14:58 in the centre of midfield to allow Lampard
15:00 to use his frankly very underrated
15:02 passing range and just general
15:04 midfield busybody activities, which
15:06 you just hardly ever saw at Chelsea, but
15:08 he could definitely do it. The two wide
15:10 attackers, they had played at wingers at their previous
15:12 clubs. It was the traditional role for their sort of
15:14 players back then. And then,
15:16 just two centre-forwards.
15:18 They would occasionally just lined up like this.
15:20 I mean, not against the big sides and certainly not often,
15:22 but the reason Ida Good Jonsson started
15:24 30 Premier League games and Drogba
15:26 still started 18 was because
15:28 this was an option. He was very
15:30 versatile and could do loads of different things, but this also
15:32 was something they could just do.
15:34 This meant that Mourinho could simultaneously
15:36 give the Premier League something it had never
15:38 seen before, but also take it
15:40 on at its own game.
15:42 And when you've got those two things all going on at once,
15:44 you win the league.
15:46 And you only concede 15 goals in the process.
15:48 And then, of course, there's all the other stuff
15:50 behind it. There's a psychology involved.
15:52 What a great manager Mourinho was
15:54 at the time. He instilled this
15:56 underdog belief in such a massive
15:58 club, which was really, really useful.
16:00 They felt like it was them against the world
16:02 in every single game. You read any
16:04 player from this team's autobiography
16:06 and they either literally say or
16:08 figuratively say, "I would have died
16:10 for that man." And they
16:12 did for like two whole seasons.
16:14 And that's why I think they're one of the most tactically
16:16 interesting teams the
16:18 Premier League has ever seen.
16:20 Like, I don't remember a team coming
16:22 along, playing a particular system and doing loads of different
16:24 things for the very first time, and you
16:26 still seeing so many of them
16:28 10, 15, getting on
16:30 for 20 years later. So yes,
16:32 if you enjoyed that, and I really,
16:34 really did, please do consider subscribing to
16:36 us here on 442. We're hoping to make
16:38 these a sort of regular
16:40 thing. If you saw the David Beckham video we did off the
16:42 back of this documentary, that was kind of us little dipping
16:44 our toes in the water to see if anything
16:46 based in the past would do quite well. And
16:48 it did, so here we are. But if you've got
16:50 any suggestions for the kind of teams
16:52 we should look at in the future, like
16:54 Man United's treble winners, Arsenal's invincibles,
16:56 Keegan's entertainers, I'll definitely be doing that.
16:58 Please do drop them in the comments
17:00 as well. And also, if you've got a better name
17:02 than just Retro Tactics,
17:04 put that in as well, because I'll
17:06 probably use it. In the meantime though, grab me
17:08 on Twitter, because I just still call it that, @AdamCleary
17:10 C-L-E-R-Y
17:12 Instagram, threads, like I'm absolutely
17:14 everywhere. 442, all of our socials
17:16 are in the corner of the video for your clicking
17:18 pleasure at any time you wish.
17:20 But until next time, I'm away
17:22 to just listen to loads of
17:24 mid-noughties landfill indie,
17:26 because to me, that's what this team sounded
17:28 like. Bye!
17:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]