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On February 19 at White Hart Lane, two coaches with futuristic pretensions met. On the Tottenham bench the new José Mourinho, who at 57 years old claimed to have reinvented himself after an existential crisis. On the bench at Leipzig, the young prodigy of the modern German coaching school, Nagelsmann, 33. The result was final: 4-0 in favor of Leipzig in the aggregate of the round of 16 tie (0-1 and 3-0).
Tormented by the intimate need to show that he was still a world reference in tactical innovation, Mourinho reinvented himself by reaffirming the ideas that made him a legend two decades ago: he waited for Leipzig with Tottenham in a low block with two lines of four, and Dele Alli with Moura off the hook. The message to his players was of containment, of patience. He was confident that Leipzig - not a team with plenty of talented individuals - would make mistakes with the ball that would allow it to be blown up against them.
If Mourinho asked his players for peace of mind, Nagelsmann asked his players to step on the accelerator. Schick, number nine , went down to midfield; Werner, the winger, was unmarked towards the penalty spot; Sabitzer and Nkunku, the offensive midfielders, turned all over the attack front from the wings to the Lloris area; and the sides, Mukiele and Angeliño appeared simultaneously above, open as ends or closing as interiors. When they lost the ball, against Mourinho's prediction, two of the three center-backs and the defensive pivot jumped under pressure. They did not mind leaving behind a single central inferior to Alli and Moura. They didn't even smell it anyway.
Disconcerted by the lack of references, Tottenham's containment lines were blown up. Leipzig did not go to rest with a 0-3 in favor because its players are neither in the first nor in the second step of the hierarchical pyramid. Because they lack level, or because they are very young. It is a team in progression that plays beyond its technical possibilities thanks to the work of a coach capable of making each transition a choreography as synchronized as it is complex, the purpose of which is that mid-range players can reach the last third of the pitch with space and time. to touch and decide. They don't have a Messi but the chaos they caused collectively was so difficult to interpret that Tottenham spent the 180-minute tie without understanding anything.
Created just 11 years ago, fledgling Leipzig led the Bundesliga last winter, at the expense of Bayern. But after forced confinement by the pandemic, the team lost momentum. There is its weak point. The Nagelsmann model is unstoppable in mid-flight but to adjust it needs time and, above all, a devilish pace that can only be reached continuously. "The lack of training does not improve the players," said the coach in The Athletic . “The things that we worked so well without the ball, that we did without thinking about the games before confinement, stopped being done afterwards. We cling to our old patterns, focusing on pressure and pressure after loss. But for all those elements to integrate and flow into the game you need maximum physical freshness, and we didn't have that ”.
The football that made Mourinho great - that of closed defenses against the uncontrolled attacks of old British football or the controlled attacks of old calcium - seems obsolete in the face of the new wave. First, by the emergence of Guardiola and, after him, by the appearance of a restless brotherhood of German technicians such as Klopp, Tuchel or Nagelsmann. All embarked on a common cause: to respond to the problem of the lack of space in the last quarter of the field when one team attacks and another defends itself in their area and up to 21 men pile up in 50x50 meters. Something about what can happen tonight if Atlético does what Atlético usually does.
"I don't think they'll ever go out to score four or five goals," says Nagelsmann, pointing to his rival in Lisbon. “1-0 for them is absolutely enough. Tottenham behaved in a similar way to Atlético and we did really well. I am convinced that we can do well again ”.
Julian Nagelsmann wants to be the future. Although the past insists on hunting him down, tonight, in the form of Cholo Simeone.
