Monday, March 1, 2010

What is a "one man" team like?

After watching Chelsea struggle against both Inter Milan and Man City, two games Didier Drogba didn’t have a look in, I have been asking myself if there’s truth in the accusations that The Blues are a one man team. I like to see quality defending and as John Terry’s off-field problems are preventing him from putting in half decent performances lately, I couldn’t help but admire the masterful display by Lucio on Wednesday. He didn’t let Drogba have as much as a sniff on the Inter goal and Jose Mourinho who built an empire at Chelsea based on solid defending would have been thoroughly satisfied with what he saw.

The Drog was again shut out by Man City in that infamous no-handshake encounter at the Bridge and again Chelsea lost. Martin Tyler runs some interesting analysis on the importance of Drogba’s goals to Chelsea in his SkySport column. I find it curious that even Man Utd would fare better without Rooney than Chelsea without Drogba. Strange that United only seems to win when Rooney is on the field and scoring, as he did yesterday against Aston Villa in the cup final.

My questions today are:

  1. Is there anything like a one man team?
  2. If there is, what makes the one man so important? Is it that he is so good or the team is built around him?
  3. Are there any modern examples of one man teams?

3. My answer to 3. would be yes, the Barcelona side of 2005-2007. They only seemed to play with one philosophy: “if you don’t know what to do with the ball, give it to Ronaldinho”.

1 comment:

  1. My answer to the first question is an outright 'NO' Great teams are however built on the extraordinary talents of certain players. One that readily comes to mind is the Argentine team of the 1980's and early 90's with Diego Maradona at the helm. I know people will mention the Liverpool team of late built around stevie 'G' but i can also mention a number of very important games liverpool have won in recent times without him. Case in point Liverpool v Juve in our champions league winning year.
    What can be said for sure is that every team be it a football club, a terror squad or an investment bank needs highfliers and that team will achieve results if the 'ordinary' team members give the 'dons' the necessary support.

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