Averse to possession, coach leads Burnley in the old English style

It is common for your team to have less possession of the ball than the opponent. In some cases, the difference is quite considerable, as in the duels against Brighton and Tottenham, which took place in February, when they only spent 31% and 34% of the time with the ball at their feet, respectively.

For Sean Dyche, however, the statistic that matters least is precisely that. After all, Burnley, which he has been in charge of since 2012, won both matches in question, fundamental results in the fight to stay in the Premier League.

This Saturday (2), the English coach’s team, 19th and runner-up in the standings, receives Pep Guardiola’s leader Manchester City at the Turf Moor stadium. A coach who conceives football, in general terms, from the ball and its quick recovery when he loses it.

Dyche walks in the opposite direction regarding the strategy to reach the opponent’s goal. His goalkeeper exchanges few passes with his teammates, his defenders do not deprive themselves of giving shots forward and he likes big strikers capable of fighting and winning over rival defenders.

If Manchester City is the team that completes the most passes in this edition of the Premier League (20,006), Burnley is the last in the category (8,638)​. On the other hand, he is the one who bets the most on long throws (1,914).

“It’s a myth that appeared about five years ago, this idea that possession wins games,” said Sean Dyche after a victory over Liverpool at the start of the 2016/2017 season. His observation most likely pointed to the success of Guardiola’s Barcelona and the Spanish national team at the beginning of the last decade as a starting point.

A survey by journalist John Muller on The Athletic website reveals the disdain that the coach has for a football of short passes, triangulations and the ball on the ground.

With the field divided into 30 quadrants, each of the spaces shows who has more possession in that specific region of the lawn. As shown in the diagram, Burnley loses in 26 of them. Even in the penalty area itself, divided into only three quadrants, there is one of them (on the right side of Burnley’s defense) in which rivals can exchange more passes than Dyche’s team.

In addition to the other two squares in their defensive area, the team only touches the ball more in the offensive corner zones. “Partly thanks to corners,” writes Muller, and the Burnley manager loves the possibility of getting the ball into the box, “but also why would a team want to have the ball in their own corner?”

In a cosmopolitan league that brings together, in addition to Guardiola, names like Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel, Antonio Conte and, until recently, had Marcelo Bielsa, the way Sean Dyche sees the game can seem anachronistic. But his profile respects an English footballing tradition, something that has been lost as the Premier League gradually opened its doors to foreign professionals and their influences.

Trained in the youth ranks of Nottingham Forest in the late 1980s, Dyche was a central defender who made his way through the lower tiers of English football. He played for clubs such as Chesterfield, Bristol City, Luton Town, Millwall and Watford.

If the country’s first division (in a time before the Premier) was no longer the stage for the most flashy football on the planet, the access divisions displayed an even more rustic spectacle. Long balls, hard tackles and headed goals were the norm.

This style (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view) was greatly influenced by Charles Hughes, technical director of the Football Association in the 1970s. He created, based on the selective use of statistical data, the concept of “positions of maximum opportunity “, that is, the need that the teams had to try to throw the ball in the opponent’s area to, supposedly, generate more chances of goal.

That’s what Sean Dyche does at Burnley, a type of strategy that he doesn’t give up and that has been relatively successful in front of the team, which he has commanded since 2012, which makes him the coach with the longest job among his colleagues. from Premier.

In 2014, they gained access to the top flight, but were relegated on their debut in the elite. Despite this, he had his contract renewed and rose again in 2015/2016, this time as the champion of the Championship. Since then, he has kept Burnley in the top flight, including a seventh-place finish in the 2017/18 season that saw the club contest the Europa League.

After escaping relegation with 17th place in the 2020/2021 Premier League, Dyche, who sees Burnley four points behind Everton, the first outside the relegation zone, is trying to avoid further relegation. With kicks, long balls and disputes for the top, in the old British style that he learned as a player and that today, without any embarrassment, he reproduces as a coach.