“For a player to be good enough to play for Liverpool,” Bill Shankly once said, “he must be prepared to run through a brick wall for me and then come out fighting on the other side.”
Suffice it to say they weren’t big on concussion protocols back in Shankly’s day. But there is one situation in football where running through a wall can make a certain amount of sense, and it has to do with pressing tactics.
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You’ve heard of a wall pass, right? If not, you can probably guess what it is. A player flicks a short pass to a team-mate and the receiver bounces it back with one touch — like you’re kicking the ball against a… OK, yeah, you get it.
In the good kind of wall pass, the type coaches teach kids, the first player dribbles until an opponent closes down, then they pass forward at an angle and continue their run so that the rebound off the wall player catches them in stride, leaving his defender in the dust. Many people call this a one-two.
But there’s also a bad type, where the first player passes straight ahead to a team-mate who is facing them and has a defender at their back. There’s no room for the passer to run forward and there’s no good option for the wall player except to bounce the ball straight back, leaving their team in the same situation as before, only now under more pressure.
The main thing that makes the second kind of wall pass bad is the receiver’s closed body shape. Allow a dark-haired young defensive midfielder named Pep Guardiola to explain what’s wrong with it: “Before I receive a ball, all I can see is what is directly ahead of me. My vision is very narrow — I cannot see absolutely anything that is going on behind me, where the team needs to attack.”
When you can’t see the opponent behind you, it’s not safe to turn and play forward. That’s why defences will often use a receiver with a closed body shape as a “pressing trigger” — a cue to sprint forward together and apply pressure when the team in possession is vulnerable. To avoid turning into danger, the player facing the wrong way will have to play the bad kind of wall pass, causing every youth coach they ever had to howl at the TV in unison.
Anyway, here’s Cody Gakpo doing that to Enzo Fernandez on Sunday:
Things only get worse for Chelsea from here, because a backward pass is another common pressing trigger. After using Fernandez’s closed body shape to force the wall pass back to Axel Disasi, Gakpo “jumps” the backward pass, blowing past the midfielder to chase the ball back to the centre-back.
The angle of Gakpo’s pressing run cuts off the return pass to Fernandez and forces Disasi to turn and play back to the goalkeeper, which — hey, look, another backward pass — is Gakpo’s cue to continue his press by jumping the centre-back to follow the ball all the way into the box.
Gakpo’s curved pressing run has taken two Chelsea players out of the build-up and closed down the ’keeper, forcing a high turnover and a dangerous Liverpool chance seconds later.
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You might say he ran through a wall pass and came out fighting on the other side.
This basic pattern — pressing a player with a closed body shape, then jumping the backward pass — is common enough to show up in simple event data. Compared to the average pass by a Premier League centre-back in front of the box, one that follows the bad kind of wall pass takes 19 per cent less time on the ball and gains 31 per cent less distance toward the other team’s goal, suggesting that those passers are feeling the pressure.
Like a lot of football’s little building blocks, once you start noticing defenders running through walls, you’ll see them everywhere.
In Saturday night’s German Supercup, RB Leipzig — a team that knows pressing tactics as well as anyone — caught Konrad Laimer, their team-mate last season but now of Bayern Munich, receiving with a closed body shape …
… and sprung a trap that won the ball in Bayern’s third.
A few hours earlier, Aston Villa did something similar in the first half to Newcastle United newcomer Sandro Tonali, setting off a cascading waterfall of pressure. It was a nice illustration of why triggers matter, as Villa didn’t just have one player chasing the ball but a whole series of pressers recognising their cues and swooping forward in graceful synchrony with each pass.
Coordination is critical for a high press, because a defender who steps out to close down leaves a hole behind them that can be exploited if their team doesn’t move with them. When one player trips a pressing trigger, that’s typically the signal for their team-mates to push up and get tight on nearby passing options, switching from a defensive structure that’s designed to deny space to more player-oriented defending in hopes of forcing a turnover in the next few seconds. If everyone finds their given opponent in time, they’ll smother the build-up and leave no way out, but if one defender misses an assignment things can get ugly fast.
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The data viz below shows a sample of wall passes in the build-up (passes 1 and 2) and the passes that centre-backs play afterwards (pass 3). Some turn back to the goalkeeper, as Disasi did under Gakpo’s pressure. A few panic and boot it long. But the go-to option is to slide the ball sideways, trying to sidestep pressure, and that’s where a second presser is needed to help.
If the defenders press together, they’ll have someone closing down that sideways pass almost as soon as it’s received, like Leipzig and Villa did. If they don’t, there’s a risk that the team in possession can complete a triangle back to the midfielder who played the wall pass, now sitting in space behind their marker.
That’s exactly what Chelsea did to Liverpool.
Fernandez started the game positioned high between the lines, and only gradually began dropping in front of Gakpo to turn and hit diagonals to Reece James on the wing. As Liverpool caught on that this was going to be a problem, Gakpo took to following Fernandez when he dropped to keep him from turning on the ball. That’s how he was in position to pull off the successful press we saw earlier.
But Fernandez’s “bad” wall passes weren’t an accident. Any smart defensive midfielder knows that receiving where he did with a closed body shape is like waving a red cape in front of Liverpool’s defence, and Fernandez saw that Gakpo was ready to jump a backward pass to close down the centre-back. So Chelsea worked out a way to bait Liverpool’s press in order to get the ball to James:
The reason it repeatedly worked was that Luis Diaz was slow to recognise Gakpo pressing the wall pass and push up to help close down the sideways outlet. And his split-second delay made all the difference between a ball-winning high press and a broken one:
There was nothing really wrong with what Gakpo was doing. Closing down a receiver who can’t see behind them is standard practice, and jumping a backward pass is a good way to eliminate two attackers with one defender.
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But if a player is prepared to run through a wall for their team, the rest had better be ready to come with them.
(Top graphic: Eamonn Dalton)
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