The Question: How important is possession?
May 24, 2010 English 1st Paragraph
Will Inter’s successful performance at Barcelona, when they had 16% possession, be seen as a turning point in football?
One of the beauties of football is its capacity for reinvention, without great rewriting of the rules. Unlike certain other sports […] football seems to have (historically justified) faith that coaches and players will be able to mediate their own way away from predictability or, worse, unwatchability. Yes, there has been tinkering with the offside rule, and the backpass and the tackle from behind have been outlawed, but essentially a player from a century ago could be parachuted into a game today and would need no more than a two-minute tutorial to get him up to speed on the modern rules…
- possession: (in football) being able to keep the ball by passing it to your teammates and not allowing the other team to have the ball.
- have historically justified faith: to believe (in something) because you have seen it happen or be true many times in the past
- To tinker with something means to make small unimportant changes to it, especially in an attempt to repair or improve it.
- To outlaw something means to make it illegal, not to allow it.
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