Soccer

Rocket men: Premier League’s flying ball-carriers are breathing fresh life into elite game

Emergence of players capable of carrying the ball with speed and power is the latest tactical response to dominant sides

Ipswich Town's Liam Delap is among the best of the new breed of ball-carrier in the game. Photograph: Zac Goodwin/PA
Ipswich Town's Liam Delap is among the best of the new breed of ball-carrier in the game. Photograph: Zac Goodwin/PA
Barney Ronay
Sat Dec 07 2024 - 08:00

The Premier League has become more exciting. And it’s fine, really. For the more grudging among us, it can be hard to accept this at face value, if only because the league is always telling you how exciting it already is, the regular in-house TV hosts styling the whole experience with the glazed and proselytising look of shopping channel presenters trying to sell you a hamper of executive cheese.

But sometimes the hamper of cheese is just good. The games are exciting right now. The median standard of teams is high. Financial power, improved scouting, and the presence of clued-up global data nerds mean even the weaker teams are studded with mind-bogglingly good footballing hyper-athletes. Ah yes, a club that was quite recently in League One and represented on the pitch by men who look as if they’ve just been dishonourably discharged from the navy. You appear to have signed a 21-year-old Paraguayan genius made entirely from elastic and feathers.

Teams that lose games are losing them in interesting ways. Bournemouth seem to be in a sustained state of emotional uproar, a team that plays at all times like they are being chased by a cloud of bees. Tottenham may be disappointing and destined to finish seventh, but they will still finish a disappointing seventh in the most wildly freewheeling way possible.

This feels significant because the Premier League has recently gone through a dull spell. Quite a lot of the past two seasons involved staring at one end of the pitch while a prancingly spry goalkeeper performed a series of pirouettes and Cruyff turns as bait to some wary opposition press.

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And in front of this an increasingly dull formula: central defenders recast as playmakers, wingers transformed into pressing machines, attacks that feel as if they’ve been constructed via a 12-step Ikea booklet. Losing to Manchester City was like being very slowly murdered with a pair of knitting needles.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Boredom is a vital base note in football. And certainly, it has been more boring than this in the past. I remember watching Wimbledon play at Selhurst Park on one of those days where it’s so cold the air hurts, when the entire game was basically Wimbledon’s goalkeeper Paul Heald pausing, fiddling with his tracksuit bottoms, looking stricken, then taking a 17-pace run-up and smashing the ball downfield with astonishing force, his boot making an incredible smacking noise each time, like a wet fish being slapped against a dockside wall.

This was just before football became genuinely fun, the early Premier League era of handsome rascal-ish players with oversized shirts and glossy, floppy hair. The game reinvents itself even when it seems to be set. The current excitement is connected to something that may or may not have a lasting effect. But there is a new kind of energy around the place. And also a new type of favourite footballer: the Impact Runner.

Southhampton's ball-carrying Tyler Dibling is challenged by Kaoru Mitoma of Brighton at the Amex Stadium in Brighton. Photograph: Charlie Crowhurst/Getty Images
Southhampton's ball-carrying Tyler Dibling is challenged by Kaoru Mitoma of Brighton at the Amex Stadium in Brighton. Photograph: Charlie Crowhurst/Getty Images

These are still largely unremarked as a collective type. Their emergence comes from a tactical problem posed by the way many stronger teams control the game. How do you attack or try to move upfield effectively when your opponents have 63 per cent possession? How do you fight being strangled by a well-constructed high block? How do you move past a pattern where large periods are spent defending like the last humans walled up inside a pier-end zombie refuge?

Players who can carry the ball with speed and power are, it seems, one attempt to disrupt this. The closest metric for measuring their impact isn’t counterattack, but the more opaque “carries”. There isn’t even really a name for this kind of player yet. The Fireship. The Siege Engine. The Transitionist. The Thigh-Bulge Ball-Hog Run Man. But they help create exciting patterns and also showcase some really good players at otherwise struggling teams.

Wolves may be riddled with errors. Gary O’Neil may look at all times as if he’s just learned he’s lost the dog in a gruelling 10-year divorce hearing. But the good moments this season have still shown what a brilliant ball-carrying footballer Matheus Cunha is, up there with the top carriers in the league, next to Anthony Elanga, Liam Delap, Adama Traoré, Tyler Dibling and Kevin Schade.

Some of these are wingers running from deep, often in a way that isn’t designed to get a cross in but to move the gain line upfield like rugby league players running into contact. And once you start looking you notice young players are emerging in the top tier with really unusual qualities.

It is probably necessary to see Delap in the visceral, calf-flexing flesh to appreciate how exciting he is, a 21-year-old at a team that can’t win who is still allowed to take risks, to apply his ability to surge. The same goes for Dibling, a seriously good young footballer whose ball-carrying style is a kind of football parkour, leaping over bollards, swaying between car bonnets, cartwheeling over a gaggle of community support officers.

It is tempting to wonder how players like this will adapt to being lured to stronger teams. Counterattack and running power made you a star. Now go and do it in a team that spends its entire existence trying to pick tiny holes in a wall of flesh 20 yards from goal.

This probably isn’t going to save too many teams further down the league. But it is undeniably exhilarating to watch, and also a reminder that there are always new forms and new shapes. The fear with football is always that it is going to exhaust itself, become a homogenised high-spec product, that we will simply run out of this thing.

And yet somehow the elite game remains remarkably resilient. Stretch it thin, micro-analyse every possible combination of defensive throw-in. It will keep on drawing you in, throwing out teenage dribble machines, a majestically surging South American, the rise of the Thigh-Rippling Carry-Merchant. — Guardian