After the World Cup break, Sevilla Fútbol Club was presented with a favorable calendar to start the comeback that would allow them to escape the relegation position in which they found themselves, after the defeat against Real Sociedad by 1-2 in a match Unforgettable for the prevaricating performance of the most shameless referee in Spanish football, Del Cerro Grande. Two months later, the team returns to the same dangerous position after having shown signs of recovery that have finally faded for a fundamental reason: the inability of coach Jorge Sampaoli to adapt to the circumstances.
The month of January had drawn a hopeful panorama, embodied in a balance of three wins, one draw and one defeat. The incorporations of Badé, Gueye, Bryan Gil and Ocampos seemed to really improve the Sevilla Fútbol Club squad and, moreover, they had an immediate performance. The preseason had served for the players to assimilate the coach’s system. The World Cup players were committed to the team. Above all, Acuña, Bono and En-Nesyri…. and the victories against rivals from the lower part allowed them to ascend to the middle zone of the classification. Those were the times when Navas and Rakitic were no longer considered ex-players, Nianzou’s virtues began to be appreciated, Acuña’s pre-World Cup oversights were forgiven, Monchi’s movements in the winter market were praised and confidence in footballers was restored like En-Nesyri. The sky in Nervión was beginning to clear without, by any means, a resplendent sun having risen.
However, Jorge Sampaoli’s peculiar way of understanding the job of coach threatened to abort the improvement. In the first place, his insistence on resorting at specific moments to that diabolical invention that has come to be called ‘the false 9’ destroyed the good work that was done in certain games, especially those played away from home, where they achieved victory It has become a pending subject. Placing Ocampos, Lamela, and even Rakitic as the most advanced player to replace En-Nesyri has been an eccentricity of the Sevilla Fútbol Club coach that has cost him several points, despite which he continues to have it burned into his style book to put it into practice, even if unsuccessfully, unless you want to maintain a result. Every time Sampaoli has used this resource, the team has evolved for the worse and they have ended up missing much-needed victories.
That stubbornness in one of his ideas reaches inexplicable levels when it comes to the defense of three centrals, an essential element in the Argentine’s game system. Jorge Sampaoli’s obstinacy in playing with three central defenders at Sevilla Fútbol Club is worthy of study in Psychology faculties. As in any other collective sport, the function of a soccer coach could be assimilated to that of an orchestra conductor. Well, if we resort to this simile, Sampaoli’s obstinacy would be comparable to that of an orchestra conductor who intends to play Beethoven’s violin concerto when he has all his violinists cold and endorses the trumpeter with the stringed instrument.
This tendency to stubbornness is not exclusive to the current coach of Sevilla Fútbol Club, since there are many others for whom the game system is inalienable and they maintain it against all odds. However, what is striking in the case of Sevilla is that their coach revolts even against the irresolvable physical conditions. The issue is very simple: you can’t play with three centrals when you don’t have centrals. Only a mind that doesn’t work with the same logic as the rest of mortals can get lost in that sentence. The opposite is believing yourself to be a genius and trying to solve the mess with solutions such as placing Joan Jordán in the center of the defense, which leads to the well-known result of an embarrassing 6-1 defeat.
Questioned on a certain occasion by something similar, Jorge Sampaoli blurted out on a certain occasion in a press conference that the Sevilla Fútbol Club had hired him to establish a certain game system. Big mistake. Neither Sevilla’s board of directors nor that of any team signs a coach to capture a style of playing football, that is not the objective. The real objective is victory, it is to achieve victories and titles. The style and the system are nothing more than instruments that must be used to achieve the true objective: to win. What seems so simple is not always understood by coaches. Some die, sportingly speaking, with their mistake. Let’s hope it doesn’t happen to Sampaoli, a good coach with many virtues who has insisted on persevering with his shortcomings.
