With England crashing out yet again in the quarter final stages of the Euro's playing a brand of rigid, defensive (and fairly negative) football, for me it's brought the end to a season whereby I'm beginning to question what the purpose of football in the modern game actually is.
I've always seen football as being a form of entertainment, where although I want to see my team win, I primarily want to be entertained for the hour and half of the actual game. Yet with a growing re-emergence of a more defensive game in order to blunt the abilities of technically superior opponents, I'm struggling to get this entertainment more and more.
The problem is simple, managers are judged upon results - you don't get the results and you're out of a job. This has lead to more and more managers being unwilling to take a 'risk' and actually go out to play football against 'better' opponents, and instead they have lined their team up in an ultra defensive, counter-attacking manner, whereby they are happy to take a draw, but are mainly looking to snatch a win via set pieces such as corners or free kicks instead of through the actual passage of normal play.
There's no doubting that this can be effective, Chelsea won the Champions League final in this way, as did Inter Milan when they took on Barcelona in the 2010 semi-final, and indeed a couple of premiership teams in recent years have keenly taken to this way of playing the game.
I can share some sympathy with teams on a very tight budget who can't afford to bring in world class players to enable them to play a more stylish or attacking game who therefore use this style of play to get results and move up the tables to hopefully better finances, but to see sides like Chelsea who have spent an absolute fortune on some of the biggest names in the game play like this is somewhat embarrassing.
This becomes even more embarrassing when you then see sides like Swansea set out to play in the same manner as your Barcelona's and Arsenal's, but on a fraction of the budget teams like Chelsea have at their disposal. Why can they do it with their limited funds, yet the big spenders sit back and 'park the bus'?
In a troubled economy, we have to choose wisely how to spend our limited income in regards to entertainment, and I personally couldn't justify spending £40-50 to go and watch a team defend for 90 minutes. I want to see attacking football from BOTH sides, a game where one team may have the edge, but you see a variety of play from both including strong defending, slick passing, cool finishing and a bit of flair now and then.
Quite how season ticket holders at sides such Stoke can justify their expenditure is beyond me, as I wouldn't pay even a quarter of their prices to watch the football they put on display most weeks.
Maybe it's because I'm less concerned with the result, and more interested in the quality of play and level of entertainment on show. All that being said, as a Norwich fan I'm all too aware of what sticking to this ethos of playing football can cost as was shown during our 04/05 season when back in the premiership for the first time in a decade, where we looked to play good football even at the expense of results and ended up being relegated by doing this (along with a couple of other factors).
There has to be a degree of temperance in the way the manager sets out the side, but simply assuming the opposition are better and putting 10 men in defence isn't the way to go about it. I want to see managers actually coach their team to play 'better' football, instead of just parking their coach on the pitch...
