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Carlo Michel Angelo Ancelotti, simply Carlo Ancelotti, is one of the most famous and recognized football coaches in the world. His resume includes 16 years of experience as a player for Parma, Roma, the powerful and legendary Milan of Arrigo Sacchi and the Italian team, with which he was a two-time World Cup player. And he has been the coach of Reggiana, Parma, Juventus, Milan, Chelsea, PSG, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Napoli and now Everton for 25 years. He has ‘barely’ won the Champions League (five times, four as DT!), National cups, super cups, the Intercontinental, the Club World Cup, the Italian League (four times), the Premier League, the Bundesliga, the Liga de France…
Well, Ancelotti was asked why he trusted James Rodríguez, the supercrac of the Colombian National Team and Everton, to whom he gave the title from the first game with only a couple of previous training sessions. “Players with quality have no problem adapting. The quality is there because football is not that complicated. The field of play is always the same, the opponents are always 11, the ball is the same, the goal does not move. Soccer is simple, ”he said, chewing gum, with his good-natured uncle face. Quite an affront to the ‘intellectuals’ of football and their algorithmic or scientific interpretations.
(You may be interested: Ancelotti, surrendered to the genius of James)
Soccer is simple, as Ancelotti says. Fans in the networks ask that Carlos Queiroz put James to play in the National Team as Ancelotti does in Everton. Well, I tell them in a low voice, as if secretly, that Queiroz put James to play as he is playing today long before Ancelotti threw the life preserver on him again. James has been playing for a while on the right of an attack by three forwards in the Colombian National Team, with the freedom to go from one side of the court to the other, sweeping the attack front also through the center and left.
That simplicity of football that Ancelotti highlights undoes that theory that the National Team plays without a point guard because James from the right, going to the center or reaching the left, holds the ball or proposes a short game or makes long frontal passes or changes from the front or plays first or puts an assist or filters the ball between the lines or makes a wall or causes fouls or finishes and scores goals. James plays on the right, but not as a winger, not as a pointer. And the Colombian National Team has the same point guard that Everton has, the same that Queiroz and Ancelotti have put to play in the same way, from the same place and with the same attack and defense tasks. James is the creation and talent from the right for the entire court.
Celebrated James, and twice.
(Also read: James and another recital with Everton, before reaching the National Team)
As it will be a point guard, a ball holder, a creator of options, that in this empire of speed, pressure and intensity, James’ Everton looks less fast and more leisurely than the majority of Premier League teams. Perhaps it is in that, in the speed of the team, where it can be found the great difference between Everton by Ancelotti and James and the Colombian National Team by Queiroz and James.
Because the National Team, on the other hand, plays at a single speed. With irony I have said before that Colombia plays at three speeds: fast, fast and accelerated, and that has led him to lose game precision in the last friendly matches, in which James was not present due to injury: his absence was of such magnitude that the team suffered to create scoring options.
In Colombia, James’ great start at Everton is the illusion of a great start for the National Team in the tie.
But watch out: James does not play alone at Everton: he has his attacking partners, Calvert-Lewin and Richarlison; on the right is Coleman his second voice in a fast burst, and Gomes proposes him to be his board in the middle of the field.
(If you didn’t see them, watch here James and Mina’s goals over the weekend)
The gold weight of James Rodríguez in the Colombian National Team is indisputable, but the National Team, which seems ‘James dependent’, is not James and 10 others. Being its fundamental player, it requires tuning in the attack of the ram designated by Queiroz, be it Falcao, his usual key, or Zapata, and of Cuadrado on the right. At the time of writing this column, it was not known if Cuadrado could reach the concentration due to sanitary restrictions of the covid-19 pandemic in Italy.
Soccer is not that complicated: Ancelotti and Queiroz know that James is their unbalancing and greatest player. Its owner: they are very clear that he is the poet of the
left-handed, who writes his passes and goals from the right.
MELUK TELLS YOU …
GABRIEL MELUK
Sports Editor
@MelukLeCuenta
