The first ten minutes were about establishing the press, the 4-2-3-1 shape, the core principles we had discussed in the meeting room.
And it was messy. The distances between the players were wrong, the timing of the press was off, and the whole structure was too easy to bypass.
After one particularly bad sequence, where Team B's goalkeeper, Mandanda, was able to play a simple pass out to his right-back, Joel Ward, who then had acres of space to play a ball up to Benteke, I blew the whistle, a sharp, piercing sound that cut through the afternoon air. "Freeze!"
Everyone stopped, a tableau of a football match frozen in time. I walked into the middle of the pitch, my eyes fixed on Pato, my left-winger. "Pato," I said, my voice calm but firm, carrying in the sudden silence. "Where are you?"
