Valérien Ismaël
"I believe in this way – high-pressing, intensity, vertical game."
Watford are in advanced talks with former Barnsley and West Brom Head Coach Valérien Ismaël after Chris Wilder’s contract has come to an end. Most fans rightly can’t get excited about the possibility of a new Head Coach, mainly because we all know the issues at the club, and the questions surrounding that. Will Gino let Ben Manga and his staff crack on with the job? Will Gino hold his nerve if Watford aren’t in the top 6 come October. Will Gino back Manga and Ismaël with the players they want for this very specific play-style? logic and common sense tells us this will all go wrong, but if you’ve not got hope; then what have you got? Usually when talks are advanced, it usually means that it’s only a matter of time until the announcement — so the point of this article is to tell you a bit more about Valérien Ismaël; his pros and cons, and hopefully give you a bit of optimism (or not) surrounding this potential appointment. The first positive, and I don’t know this for sure, is this to me clearly seems like a Ben Manga appointment; Ismael has spent the majority of his career in German football; spending thirteen years there — first playing and then coaching the youth teams before making his way to the first team. They would have crossed paths at some point or acknlowedged one another given Manga was influential in the appointment of Oliver Glasner at Franfurt, who followed ‘Val’ from LASK.
Style of play?
His style of football will be quite pleasing to Watford fans, given our greatest ever manager in Graham Taylor played a similar brand of football. There’s no right way to play the game, so expect snobbery remarks if this is the way we’re going to play. Ismaël is very much wedded to his way of playing, which has coined the phrase 'Val-ball' — the ever known phenomenon of inserting a managers name and putting ball on the end. But what is it? well It’s similar to the beliefs of Valeriy Labonovsky’s outlook on football; which is aggressive pressing from the front and to exploit their opponents gaps from their off ball setup; however Val Ball is mainly what you do off the ball, and that’s extremely high pressing football, with the idea to lock down the opposing team in their own third, so you can bombard their box with crosses, shots, heavy wing play to drag out the midfielders into wide areas, so the second balls can create shooting opportunities. It’s long ball football to cause chaos — but it’s not strictly just long ball. Before it all went wrong at West Brom, Joseph Masi described the football they were playing at the start of the season as high speed, high intensity, high risk, relentless, frantic, breathless, brilliant and exhausting. He also went onto say But the truth is you don’t understand it until you see it in action. Centre-backs camped on the half-way line, wing-backs playing as wingers, central midfielders consistently winning the ball on the edge of the opposition’s area and forwards pressing as if their futures depend on it. Albion squeeze so high up the pitch that the opposition have no choice but to sit deep. The idea behind it is he wants to score goals and lots of them, but the achilleas heel is that one long ball over the top could undo everything, but Ismaël believes that’s the risk he’s willing to take as his team will score more than you. At Barnsley it worked to perfection, because most teams dominated the ball against them, and that style would counter the possession based teams. There’s an element of Leicester winning the league vibe to it, teams thought they could get around it, but they couldn’t. At West Brom, being one of the favourites for promotion, teams would sit back and not allow that space or engage in duels to make the game frantic. I don’t think Watford will be one of the favourites for promotion, but teams will setup a certain way against us, so that is something we’ll need to overcome.
Key components:
Extreme fitness is an obvious one and squad depth. He will use subs to keep that intensity throughout the 90 minutes as much as he can. But the main one after watching his teams is a physical striker who can lead the line on his own. At LASK he used João Klauss to very good effect, and then at Barnsley had Carlton Morris and Daryl Dike. If Watford don’t recruit to this specific style, not only will it be bad to watch and not work, we’ll be back where we always are with an unhappy fanbase, a mismatched squad and most likely, bad results. The first signing will tell us a lot of where this is going. West Brom didn’t have a striker that really fitted what he needed, and rather than giving it time, they sacked him after it just wasn’t working. There’s arguments to both sides of that — they’ll say you should adapt, and he’ll say well you brought me in for the style I’ve shown to get results in my last two jobs, so give me what I need; help me to help you.
This was only a little article to give a feeling out there; I’ll write more once the appointment has been confirmed.