Chapter Ten: The Old General's Exploration

  Thanks to book friend "Gongsun Tang" for the reward, continue to ask for recommendation votes and member clicks ^_^

  In addition, constantly attacking the opponent's goal can easily excite their goalkeeper and lead to various mistakes. Furthermore, prolonged attacks without scoring can cause anxiety, so a team's ability to seize opportunities when pressing forward will inevitably decrease to varying degrees compared to counter-attacking, even for top-level teams. This is why it often happens that one side dominates the game but ends up losing, sometimes by a large margin.

  In fact, the peak Barcelona was also because there was Messi, a quasi-ball king-level super forward, plus the overall strength was extremely strong, so they rarely encountered such situations. However, Gao Lin wanted the national team, which only had Asian second-rate personnel configuration, to be able to use defensive counterattacks to achieve a situation where they were not weak against strong teams, and also use oppressive possession football tactics to achieve a stable high winning percentage when facing opponents who were weaker than or similar in strength to the national team. The difficulty of this was simply too great.

  Defensive countermeasures are relatively easy to practice, but suppressive control of the ball requires at least two of the following conditions: "ability to create and grasp shooting opportunities", "strong ball control ability", "efficient frontcourt pressing (including tactical and physical aspects)", and "very strong one-on-one defensive ability or fast backtracking speed of defenders". At that time, neither the Chinese national team nor Jiangsu Shuntian team, which was later taken over by Gao Jun, possessed more than one of these abilities - frontcourt pressing, and it wasn't even particularly solid. It's not hard to understand why he couldn't succeed...

  But for Gao Lin, an idealist who has taken it upon himself to revive Chinese football, in a difficult period where Chinese football talent is scarce, without excellent players who can meet the requirements in terms of both quality and quantity, he can only rack his brains to try to find new tactics and make changes, but this approach not only has no meaning, but also almost destroyed the reputation that Gao Lin had built up over the years.

  But now that he has crossed over, Gao Jun is delighted to discover that this difficult problem is no longer as insurmountable as climbing to the sky. Because now he not only has the possibility of growing into a super giant star in Chinese football history, but also can help other young players grow better. And after personnel configuration is strengthened, this difficulty will no longer be so terrible, because strength and weakness are relative!

  After realizing this, Gao Jun's mentality, which had been somewhat unbalanced since being forced to leave the national team, finally returned to calmness. This is undoubtedly a great thing for a forward like him. His arrival at Chongming Football Base was even more beneficial for him to solve this problem, as his mentor Xu Genbao also did some very constructive work in this aspect...

  In the history of Chinese football, teams that adopted oppressive possession-based tactics and achieved outstanding results all relied on powerful foreign aid (although not solely relying on foreign aid). However, Gao Lin's mentor Xu Genbao took a different approach. On Chongming Island, he spent "ten years sharpening one sword" and hoped to solve the problem of Chinese players' inability to master possession-based attacking tactics through cultivating young players from an early age.

  Xu Genbao's idea is to first "practice makes perfect", secondly, to cultivate the tacit understanding between players from a young age, and then reduce the error rate of passing and receiving through double insurance. In addition, by emphasizing flexibility and balance in physical selection to meet the requirements of oppressive control ball tactics, it can strengthen the efficiency of frontcourt pressing through "surrounding and intercepting", and make up for the lack of players' physical quality and dribbling ability through "receiving and passing". This is what he often calls the "six-word guiding principle".

  But in the early days after this team participated in the professional league, due to the lack of players with outstanding personal abilities in both the front and back courts, the possession rate was high, but the actual scoring opportunities created were not many. Moreover, even if opportunities arose, they were often wasted. In addition, the defensive line lacked individual ability, fearing fast breaks and aerial bombardments, so poor results were inevitable.

  Until later, Gao Jun made some adjustments to the team's playing style during his short-term coaching, incorporating part of his own technical flow defense and counterattack into it, the situation improved somewhat. However, the team's performance did not fully recover until later when excellent foreign aid was introduced to enhance the ability to grasp opportunities in the frontcourt, coupled with the gradual maturity of young players within the team, which ultimately achieved a qualitative change. But this has deviated from Xu's original idea, let alone that Dongfang's strongest period did not reach the level of Asia's top club teams, so Xu Genbao's exploration did not achieve complete success.

  However, Gao Jun's crossing may change this history. With his unparalleled ability to seize opportunities, he can completely replace the role of super foreign aid and even do better than them. Once they can rush into the CSL earlier, Coach Xu will not need to sell out key players like Zhang Linpeng prematurely. The team's personnel configuration will be stronger, and the coordination will be more tacit (when Dongfang team rushed into the CSL, only five or six of the first batch of players remained in the team, and the others were added later. The degree of tacit understanding is not as high as most people think). At that time, the team's oppressive possession-based tactics will definitely be more powerful.

  In addition, Coach Xu is an old-school coach who lacks the concept of scientific training. It wasn't until 2014 that he hired a foreign goalkeeper coach for the first time in history. The result was that the main goalkeeper, who had been a big leak last season, transformed into one of the best goalkeepers in the country in just a few months. The impact is clear to see. If each specialized training has high-level foreign coaches in charge, how much will Dongfang's strength be improved? It's exciting to think about it. Especially high-level physical trainers can play an immeasurable role in improving the physical quality of young players in the future Dongfang team. However, Gao Jun also knows that his mentor is stubborn and it's not easy to persuade him. Moreover, high-level specialized coaches are quite expensive, and sometimes even spending money can't hire them...

  Fortunately, Director Xu is stubborn, but as long as he can see the effect with his own eyes, he is still willing to try. In history, after seeing the rapid progress of the goalkeeper level of the neighboring Huahua team, he seized the opportunity of internal chaos in Huahua team and poached an excellent foreign goalkeeper coach, and finally gained a surprise.

  In addition, Chongming Football Base had also employed a youth coach named Coco from France in the past. The solid technical foundation of the young players later on was closely related to him. However, the Frenchman's relaxed management approach conflicted with Coach Xu's strict military-style discipline, and he was eventually let go by Old Xu after not staying for long. This incident also illustrates that Coach Xu is not as conservative as some people think.