Chess cannot be compared with football, although football is sometimes referred to as ‘chess football’. This means patiently passing the ball to each other until an opening is found.
Nevertheless, I would like to bring these otherwise incomparable sports under one heading – the denominator of defence. I will be careful, because I know football, but not chess. I came to this thanks to a report by chess employee Gert Ligterink in de Volkskrant of the duel in Dubai for the world title between the Norwegian world champion Magnus Carlsen and his Russian challenger Ian Nepomniachchi.
Ligterink was annoyed by the three draws with which this match started. “After a series of 17 draws, it is high time that a classic duel was won in a World Cup match,” he wrote. The last win in a World Cup took place on November 24, 2016, when Carlsen beat the Russian Sergej Karjakin.
According to Ligterink, all these draws are due to ‘the arrival of increasingly powerful computer programs that can calculate more deeply than the top human chess players. With digital help, the teams of both players put together an opening repertoire tailored to the opponent in which they can hardly be surprised. The result is that in most games after the opening phase a position is created in which the chance of winning is minimal.”
This formulation activated the football fan in me. In today’s top football, too, an increasing effort is being made to minimize ‘the chance of winning’ by the opponent. Preventing goals has become more important than scoring. The defenders, by definition not the most creative players, therefore gain possession of the ball more often than the attackers.
Those defenders have also gained a numerical advantage. In the fifties – Grandpa tells us – I saw a team consisting of a goalkeeper, three defenders (two backs, a stopper spindle), two midfielders and five attackers (two wingers, two inside players and a center forward). Later on, playing with three, often two, attackers became normal.
The modern coach instructs his team on the basis of all kinds of statistical facts about the opponent. This is called ‘compact defense’ in trainer jargon, and then ‘watching the counter’. It leads to boring, almost scoreless matches.
Marco van Basten recently rightly complained on Ziggo Sport about the way in which much weaker teams in the Eredivisie are fighting Ajax today. They only play with one striker, also at home, the rest defend their own penalty area in two lines. Only in the last fifteen minutes does such a team move forward in the hope that Ajax has pounded itself hard. You also saw the Norwegian team do it against the Netherlands.
“There is nothing more to it for the neutral spectator,” said Van Basten. But the neutral spectator is in the minority and has nothing to say. National coach Louis van Gaal, who used to emphasize the attack, has also allowed his teams to play more defensively. He had success with it at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and therefore wants to play in Qatar with only two strikers. And if ‘we’ thus become world champions? I admit: then you won’t hear me complaining for a while.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of December 1, 2021
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