A look inside

While South Korea's Olympic football team is on the road to London Olympics, Korean soccer had some turmoil. According to Ilgan Sports and to English newspapers, Kim Bo-Kyung is on the verge of a transfer to Cardiff City for approximately €3 million in transfer fees. Celtic's manager Neil Lennon admitted that Kim Bo-Kyung  is on his radar too. QPR is near to buy Celtic's South Korea international Ki Sung-Yueng: rumors from Seoul claim about a fee of £7m agreed between QPR and Celtic. But the big news is the QPR's £2m capture of Park Ji-sung. The QPR board of directors continue to rebuild the team in the way to establish it as a regular Premier League side. They added defender Fabio da Silva on loan, England keeper Robert Green, forward Andy Johnson and New Zealand international Ryan Nelsen, as well Malian international Samba Diakite after a loan spell at the club last season. The arrival of Park Ji-Sung could help too. Coming to QPR, Hughes understood that his team needed to attack from the flanks. So he went to a 4-2-3-1 as favorite formation this past season for the Rangers. Hughes prefers to play two strikers as he did at Blackburn. In general, he likes to have two banks of four behind the ball, such as Roy Hodgson likes. The approach at QPR was different and Hughes enjoyed to have Bobby Zamora as lone forward, for a lot of reasons. If he will stay on this formation he brought on a player able to fill many voids. Park can play as right-winger, left-winger or attacking midfielder but he can also play as central midfielder in a more offensive approach. Park showed his best last season at Manchester United playing as left-winger. What can we expect? It's hard to say with such a small dataset available from last season. In the last EPL campaign, Park made just 10 appearances, 7 as starter, but he scored 2 goal and made 1 assist, showing to be cynical near the net. He showed his technical skills maintaining a good 89.5% of pass success rate. Park Ji-Sung is a player Mark Hughes wanted. Probably Hughes will ask him to be involved in build up play in the final third. With Adel Taarab on the left, QPR's manager could line up Park as right-winger going inside or attacking midfielder just behind Zamora, with the duty to collapse back and help the midfielder on the defensive phase. In that way, Hughes could mantain Taarab on the starting line up, despite his defensive lacks, maintaining the shape and balance of the side.

End of the run

So, Al Wasl ended Diego Maradona's tenure as coach. Despite a recent chairman statement that denied plans to sack the coach, a meeting of Al Wasl's board of directors opted to terminate Maradona's contract. A trophyless season sealed his fate. It was not just a lack of discipline through this season that lead to part the ways. It was a technical failure with the team that finished eighth in the 12-team league. The club's hopes to come back to the top of the table was nullified. Team were physically exhausted at the end of the season. But also the relationship between Maradona and the board of directors was faulty after Maradona blamed a lack of money to buy the needed players. But not all the blame has to be put on Maradona's shoulders. Al Wasl failed to give him technical gifted players: all the guys that was coming during last summer were from Division One sides. Al Wasl Football Company haven't buy the right players to improve the team. The whole club showed inability to deal with the UAE’s professional era. Al Wasl had problems preceding Maradona’s arrival. The decision to terminate the Argentine’s contract was easy but the whole club needs of a turmoil.

Steve Clarke

Former Scotland international Steve Clarke worked under Ruud Gullit and Josè Mourinho at Chelsea. The influence of the club’s first-team coach have been felt at Anfield too, where he worked under Kenny Dalglish. “He likes to be at the heart of things when it comes to organising sessions. At West Ham, he would be in first thing in the morning planning out his sessions and would know what the team needed to do to improve." Charlton assistant manager Alex Dyer, who worked alongside Clarke at West Ham, told Goal.com UK. Clark is very organised and his sessions are planned to the tee. Before to come at Anfield, Steve Clarke, which also spent time on the backroom staff at Newcastle, was a Chelsea man since 1987 so he worked under the Josè Mourinho and learned a lot on running the team sessions. Clarke, and Brendan Rodgers, both learned from Moruinho as he learned from Louis Van Gaal. "You can't say 'that's better, that's the reason'," he once said "There's so many different factors, so many combinations of little things that all come together to make the package successful. I think the intensity the Portuguese staff generate in training, before matches...Everything's geared towards that - people performing at their best at all times." Extensive ball-control sessions, aerobic but tactical exercises with the ball to maximised player individual fitness and combativeness to play a high-tempo game are the base of Mourinho and Rui Faria’s methodology. And Mourinho praised Clarke.   

"He knows every player in English football. If I'm before the game and I have the sheet of the opponents and there comes the subs - who is this player? He knows this player is from the academy, he has 179 centimetres, he is fast, he is slow, and he is fat." (Josè Mourinho on Steve Clarke)

So what if Clark will keep Mourinho's philosphy to build West Brom? The skills he developed and the philosophy he had formed during his stint with Mourinho could be the base of his work. The first task could be get the players motivated.

"Motivation is the most important thing. Some of them can and they don't want, some of them want and they can't. We want players who can do it and at the same time want to do it." (Josè Mourinho)

"So I could say for example to one player, 'Hey, last two seasons, 11 matches - why? Why? You play nothing, you don't work, you don't sleep, you are always injured...He don't like you?...Why you don't play?' And the player he has to be open. So in this moment you know you can always get feelings from the players. There are some players that are never responsible for their failure - 'manager's training methodology is bad'. Other players, they go straight to the point and they say, 'I am guilty. I was not committed, I have to change myself.' Other players they can say, 'I don't like this tactical system'....  It is important to start an open relation with them." (Josè Mourinho)

"I told [Adrian] Mutu, you are already a rich boy, you won a lot of money, you are still in a big contract. So no problem with your future about money, no problem about prestige in your home country. When you go back to Romania you will be one of the kings. But five years after you leave football nobody remembers you. Only if you do big things. This is what makes history."(Josè Mourinho)

 And let the group grow.

"I think I could identify because of their style of play. When you are outside and you see players on the pitch you can more or less smell it. I think what I did well with Lampard and Terry was to give them more power than they normally have in a dressing room. I give them the crown, you know? 'You have responsibility.' It was important for the group. And I think was important to have these players on your side - to help you, not to disturb you...I think we have very good players in the team, but these two personalities were very important to help me in my leadership." (Josè Mourinho)

At Liverpool, Clark usually had training sessions with 20 minutes to warm the players up, 20 minutes more technical  with a passing drill or finishing, then the possession element, until the final game with the goalkeepers at the the end. West Brom have been the land of Roy Hodgson’s play style - deep in defence, and quick fast-breaks - and this could be a good news for Clarke, which has a reputation for intensive coaching and solid defense. He should put enphasis on play the ball on the ground and should prioritize defensive organization. It’s a gamble  and there are clear holes in WBA but Steve Clarke to West Bromwich Albion is an intriguing appointment.

Zola and Waftord

Gianfranco Zola has been confirmed as the new manager of Watford following Sean Dyche's sack and takeover by the Pozzo family. For Zola this is the second stint after his previous job with the West Ham, where he was a surprising choice to replace Alan Curbishley and where he had a good team that haven't shown  his potential under the Italian manager.  Zola’s impact at West Ham was good, as the team played an active 4-3-3 formation, keeping the ball well and showing a good brand of football, before a defensive collapses amid 2008/9 campaign ruined the season. The following season the Hammers avoid relegation but Zola was fired. Now Zola will have another chance at Watford.  Watford came from a terrible start last season before some good results started improving the side, making them very hard to beat. Troy Deeney, Michael Kightly and Alex Kacaniklic all provided good display and contributed to a good mid-table end of the season. Zola is regarded as having excellent interpersonal skills, and that could help him to deal  with the heavy pressure coming with being the boss at the club. Zola has a preferred system, the 4-3-3 formation and, though he also utilized a 4-4-2, he was criticised at West Ham for his persistence with the 4-3-3 with West Ham struggling to create chances from open play and with the lack of personnel to play it. His overall league record as West Ham manager were of played 80, won 23, drawn 21, lost 36. We will see if he will start from his 4-3-3 again...a key factor of this system is the use of wide players ready to cut inside, close to goal, able to play inside latest thirty yards of the pitch.

Next stop: Tottenham

So, André is back. André Villas-Boas signed a three-years deal with the Tottenham Hotspurs. He beat out former France coach Laurent Blanc, Everton manager David Moyes and Wigan boss Roberto Martínez. He will face two challenges: to succeed Harry Redknapp and to succeed in his second job in English football after Chelsea's failure. Villas-Boas has now to show he learned from Chelsea mistakes. He has a contract that presumes another three-year to do it. His first task will be try to keep Luka Modric. The Croatian could be one of the interior midfielders. The other should be Van der Vaart but there is also the Hoffenheim's midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson, the expected next team's sign. With both Modric - if he stays - and Sigurdsson, AVB could play his preferred play style: retain the ball and attack at the right moment. The appointment of AVB represents a move away from Herry Redknapp tactics. With AVB Tottenham will be more active and less reactive. At Chelsea, AVB had to change his mind long the way:
“Our No 6 [at Porto, the central midfielder] sometimes became a more attacking midfielder and we tried to do that here. We decided it doesn’t work here, so that’s one of the things I have adapted. You lose a little bit of balance in the Premier League if you play that way. Transitions here are much more direct, making the importance of the No 6 to stay in position most decisive.” (André Villas-Boas 2011)
AVB's interchanging midfield didn't work with the Blues due to the fact that transitions are much more direct in the Premier League, so the No 6 has to stay in position to defend counter-attacks. How Scott Parker can play in this role the way AVB wants?

 ADV isn't a Mourinhesque manager as it was expected and it's hard to notice similarities on the pitch. Villas-Boas prefers a 4-3-3 formation. He thinks the strenght of a team is the tactical organization over players' skills. By the way, at Chelsea he made some adjustments. At Porto, Villas-Boas played with a high defensive line and a strong pressing action up top. Unfortunely, Chelsea was full of old warriors with no oil left in their tank. There was too much slow players to play with a high defensive line. Teams exploited this weakness. So he went to change his mind becoming more cautious. And also he went from his loved 4-3-3 to a 4-2-3-1 with Juan Mata as No. 10. But the bigger questions next stop will be around the way to defend. We will see how AVD will structure his side without the ball. The defensive potential isn't solid: Ledley King, Michael Dawson, and William Gallas aren't getting any younger so the team hopes to add Ajax defender Jan Vertonghen. A high defensive line is a logical consequence of a pressing action. His Porto featured heavy pressing to win the ball, so AVB could ask his players to get quickly up to press high. Also, would be povital for him to have the players getting behind the ball quickly in a compact unit when the ball is lost. We will see if Tottenham's roster will be suited to stick to AVB's footballing philosophy. On the flanks, AVB wants two fast and goal scoring inside forwards/wingers. At Porto they was Hulk and Silvestre Varela. At Chelsea Mata and Daniel Sturridge.  At London, Gareth Bale and Aaron Lennon could be his guys.

Italians do it better

While the critics share their toughts about tiki-taka, with some people saying that the Spanish play style of retaining the ball with short passing is boring, there is another team that deserves to take a look to. Cesare Prandelli’s Italy showed that is possible to win without a clear formation or playing style. Prandelli utilised a 3-5-2 for Italy’s two initial matches against Spain and Croatia, then he switched to a 4-3-1-2 against Ireland and England. Two years ago, in the tiki-taka Era, Josè Mourinho shocked the world showing that a side can win playing reactive football. After being outplayed when he tried a different approach, Mourinho came back to his ordinary strategy to let the opponents have the ball in the way to play fast-breaks. It was the same tactics that Chelsea utilized at the Nou Camp a few months ago and they produced in the 2012 Champions League final against Bayern. Coming back to Prandelli, he tried to give his team an indentity. Prandelli went to this tournament after studied both 4-3-3 and 4-3-1-2 formations. But the fixing scandal and bad shape of some players made him playing with a 3-5-2 pattern. He relied on counter-attacking against Spain, while played a more offensive oriented football against Ireland, Croatia and England. With both Croatia and Ireland, Italy found troubles playing this kind of football and raised questions about how they are able to succeed with attacking football. Against England, things were different: Cesare Prandelli brought in Riccardo Montolivo to play as No. 10, because of concerns over Thiago Motta and, against a reactive team like Roy Hodgson's side, Italian way produced to dominate the middle of the pitch. Prandelli's team has the tactical flexibility to switch between patterns within the match. During the match, Prandelli also brought on Alessandro Diamanti and Antonio Nocerino playing also with a 5 men-midfield. They adapt the formation to the opponents. But the key is on their philosophy: can a team be active and also reactive? Italy has done it. This is maybe the first time we have a big team relying on the opponents features with success. With English happy to let them the ball, and with no pressing there, Italy was able to built an entertaining active kind of football. Against Germany, Italy played the diamond, lining up Federico Balzaretti as right-back, a position not unsual for this player, that played this role during his stints with Torino and Juventus. Germany dominated possession, loading the centre of the pitch with four good ball carriers in Mesut Ozil, Toni Kroos, Lukas Podolski and Bastian Schweinsteiger. But Italy wanted not sacrifice "two years' work" by coming back to a more reactive approach, such as coach Cesare Prandelli said. 
Jogi Low pick Ozil to chase Andrea Pirlo. But after few minutes, Germany's head coach changed his mind and swithced the duty to cover the Italian deep-lying playmaker to Kroos. That changed the initial pattern in a 4-4-2 with Ozil lined up as right wing. This move wasn't particularly effective: with the Germany loading the middle of the pitch, Italians found spaces on the left side. Italian strategy was clear: they tried to find a free-man in the gaps between defensive and midfield's lines of Germany and to isolate Antiono Cassano in one-to-one situations on the left, where played the unimpressive Jérôme Boateng. And the first goal came from a movement of Cassano in a 1 vs 1 situation following a forward move made by left-back Giorgio Chiellini. Mario Balotelli aside, Cassano's performance was particularly brilliant. He made a lot of runs, trying to find spaces behind rivals' midfield's line and also playing the one-to-one on the flank. Prandelli’s substitutions in the second half made the team more safe defensively, when Italians showed other issues about fitness shape. 

One of the most defensive display made by the Italians was the utilization of the so called 'coperture preventive' - maybe a good English translation could be precautionary coverage - a defensive action based on send against the ball carrier the closest player in the way to stop the counter-attack and to allow to his teammates to gain time recovering their defensive positions. This is a key part of the game: how avoid transitions and how play defensive transitions. And It's a key part of Prandelli's game plan. Another good move made by Prandelly was to keep two strikers high up the pitch without big defensive duties, in the way to have two men ready for the counter-attacks. At the end, Low and Germany was tactically outcoached by Prandelli: Germans had no idea on how contain Italian forwards and how to find spaces in the middle fo the pitch. In the second half, Prandelli replaced Riccardo Montolivo and inserted Thiago Motta then brought on Alessandro Diamanti for Cassano and Antonio Di Natale for Balotelli, switching to a 4-4-1-1 formation. 
Italy was impressive defensively, especially with the midfielders, even ready to close the gaps centrally, to help the defense and to cover the pass options around Germany's ball carriers. We have seen also Daniele De Rossi playing as a true left back, in a kind of 5-men defense, against Boateng during the second part of the game...

Coach Bert van Merwijk resigned

Henk Spaan - editor of Hard Gras - said after the World Cup 2010 final that Holland destroyed a 40-year tradition of Total Football. The Netherlands have a tradition of playing attacking football, while van Marwijk’s squad played a pragmatic brend of football in 2010. So the coach was under pressure to come back to the old way. But Holland's effort to come back to his well known and prideful '70s' play style failed miserably. Total Football wasn't here. And, as you know, Bert van Marwijk has stepped down as Holland's coach. van Marwijk was fighting to retain his job after this terrible Euro Cup. KNVB confirmed him, but the coach decided to step down after his team were eliminated in the first round of the tournament following three straight defeats against Denmark, Germany and Portugal. Former Feyenoord and Borussia Dortmund coach relied on the squad which lost the World Cup 2010 to Spain but it didn't pay. He stayed with his usual starting XI, and forgot on the bench young guns such as Kevin Strootman or Ron Vlaar. The problem here was also that van Marwijk lost the dressing room: his relationships with Arjen Robben, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, and Rafael van der Vaart, who had publicly criticised him, were bad. There was tension there, and not a positive one. On the pitch, his team was outplayed, specially in middle, where Mark van Bommel, coach's son-in-law, and Nigel de Jong were a mess. And the decision of van Marwijk to play with two holding players was highly criticized. The defense was slow and not good enough, the attackers up top never worked - mainly against Denmark when Holland didin't score despite they had over 30 shots - and a dualism was created in a nation split about  Robin van Persie or Huntelaar as Van Marwijk's pick at centre forward. Some players underperformed: van Persie scored  43 goals in 54 appearances for both Arsenal and Holland this season but, match against Germany aside, didn't find the net. The team had not a reliable left-back in Jetro Willems, 18 years-old, too young to fill the void. But the task to sub Van Marwijk will be not easy: after all, he's the man that lead the Dutch near to be World Cup champions. The questions is: who will replace him? After the disaster of World Cup 2002, should be not easy to see Louis Van Gaal in charge of Oranje once more. Ruud Gullit too lost his appeal after unimpressive stints with Feyenoord, Los Angeles Galaxy and Terek Grozny. Frank Rijkaard has previously coached Holland and reached the semi-finals at Euro 2000 so he could deserve another chance. He's the current Saudi Arabia's head coach. Former international Frank de Boer did a great job the past two seasons leading Ajax to two Eredivisie crowns but he seems determined to stay with the club. Guus Hiddink is another former Holland boss but he got a big paycheck with Anzhi Makhachkala. Two ousiders could be Gertjan Verbeek and Will Van Hanegem. Coo Adriaanse is unemployed, and he's a guy that can satisfy KNVB's demand about tactics and philosophy. Be that as it may, with Holland criticised for a lack of fitness, the first goal should be to bring on Dutch fitness trainer Raymond Verheijen.