Book Review "The Immortals"

Book Review "The Immortals"

In this book, Arrigo Sacchi becomes the storyteller and leads the reader through his first season with AC Milan. The unique aspect of this book is Smemoranda diary that Arrigo claims to keep during the whole time he was coaching. Apart from training plans he used, we see the aspects of the game he was focusing on after each match. The mentality of Arrigo is something that turned the page in football history. It was not enough to win beautifully. That book pretty much sums up with the sentence: "If we play well, we win".

Authors of this review:

Nikita Goncharenko

Date of Publication:

29/05/2022

Academic Reference:

Sacchi A. & Garlando L., 2021. The Immortals. Backpage. MBM Print. Great Britain.

Tags:football coachingfootball history

Key Ideas

As a young boy, Arrigo had got to experience the ambivalent moment that later impacted all his career. While on the trip with his father to Germany, he learnt that slyness and cunning that Italians valued did not help reaching the great results. Comparing it to football, the Italian way of playing football was caging the opponents in defensive traps. The mentality that brought in football, on contrary, was about hard work and ideas. He wanted to play with players going forward and starting to attack even during the defensive stage. (p. 11-12)

Pressing became the main point of focus for Arrigo's football. He was emphasing the importance of starting pressing from opponent's goals to decrease the distance for the scoring the goal when the ball is retained. Moreover, the closer you are to opponent's goals, the further opponents are from your goals. (p. 31-32)

The benefit of this model was clear: if you can run less by doing it efficiently, you save energy. For this purpose, the large number of players needs to be close to the ball. The numerical superiority gives less passing options for opponents to escape from pressing. (p. 31-32)

One of the main values he promoted was 'continuous aggression'. He wanted his players to continously give passion. For example, if players' heartrate was not high enough after trainings, he would send them for additional running drills, so, that 'in the next training matches they'd make more effort.' (p. 33-34)

One of the tools Arrigo used to correct mistakes from previous games was themed games. To decrease the number of long balls, he would keep the restriction to keeping the ball on the ground. To decrease the time players keep the ball before passing, he was introducing the rule of 2 touches within training matches. To make players use the width of the field, he made it compulsory to cross before scoring. (p. 36)

Arrigo's log shows him as the person who never loses concentration. He claims that after every match of the way to final of the Europian Champions Cup he would find something to improve. Those improve points are essentially his observations of football. (p. 60)

When Arsene Wenger came to visit AC Milan of Arrigo Sacchi, the president of AC Milan at that time (Berlusconi) got upset and worried that Arrigo's ideas are going to be stolen. Yet, Arrigo noticed that the secret indedient is not in training plans. It is in automatism of players that know where (space) and when (time) they need to be. That's something that Arrigo was training for seasons and that's something that can't be taken during one-time observations. To sum up, he claimed: 'what gave us strength were those automatisms, those internalised understandings that had been made instinctive by two years of work.' (p.117-131)

Aparently, Silvio Berlusconi was raising the topic of creating European Super League. That turned out to be a strong pressure on his team that season when Arrigo Sacchi was going after his first European Champions Cup. Several goals were not counted and, generally, referring was clearly against AC Milan. In his attempt to describe why Super League did not happen back then, Arrigo states: 'The existing national leagues would lose presige while UEFA would miss out a large amount of money.' (p. 120)

Interesting conversation happened once with Roberto Mancini. He would ask Arrigo Sacchi to share how to decrease the interference of directors into his work. Arrigo simply recommended to start conversations with directors from discussing the game principles, instead of individual players 'because they don't have the knowledge to keep up.' (p. 144-145)

Citations

'How low a player's self-esteem be if he is completely removed from the construction of the play?'(p. 14)

''Ideas' meant managing to communicate, in the quickest and clearest way possible ... 'Hard work' meant obtaining the highest levels of professionalism and effort both in training and in games, building a culture of generosity and sacrifice.'(p. 27)

Citation Arrigo provides these two citations of Bertolt Brecht in his book: 'Without a script, there can be only improvisation and carelessness.' && 'Even the most successful actors need other actors to be able to express their ability to the full.' (p. 37)

Instruction Arrigo would give to his scout: 'Don't just watch him train. Watch how he behaves off the pitch, where and what he eats.' (p. 46)

'Throughout ancient history, major achievements were often heralded by special atmospheric events.' (p. 53)

'For me, a player's hierarchy of interests must be: teammate, ball and in the last place, opponent. ... their reference point (talking about Dutch players) was more the opponent that the teammates.' (p. 54)

Talking about Marco Van Basten: 'To show Marco the right position to take up when pressing, I had to shout into the megaphone a thousand times. Another thousand times, I had to draw him a diagram.' (p. 75)

'Yugoslavian football has often had great champions but rarely great teams, because they've never managed to transform the abundant individual talent into collective strength.' (p. 81)

'You might only face one shot per match, but when it came, you had to be ready to react.' (p. 102)

'Tactics, not strategy. ... Tactics are about trying to take advantage of an opposition weaknesses and waiting for them to make a mistake. A strategy is a positive plan of action to carry out. ... tactics without strategy are for losers.' (p.111-112)

'I wanted every training match to be just like a proper game, with everyone bringing the same effort and the same grit.' (p. 139)

External References

Next book: Andrea Pirlo with Alessandro Alciato. I think therefore I play.