The best defenders will do anything to stop you scoring, and Roy O’Donovan has had a million physical and mental battles.
Watching defenders evolve over the 18 years of my career has been a bit like seeing human evolution crammed into those two decades, from the Neanderthals who tried to maim me as a kid to the VAR-wary sophisticates nowadays.
Their goal hasn’t changed, which is fundamentally just to stop me or any striker from putting the ball in the net. But the way they do it, the strategies they use, are pretty evolved – these days it’s as much the subterfuge of Oceans XI as Fight Night.
When I made my debut as a teenager in the League of Ireland, as a lippy 20-year-old being linked with a move to England, there were precious few cameras and even fewer scruples – defenders got away with murder. I remember one of my first games where as a young, nippy winger, I fancied myself to run the opposition centre-half ragged.
At the first opportunity I knocked the ball past him and raced away; being a wily old pro, he shut down my angles and cornered me. I duly slipped the ball through his legs, much to the delight of the crowd, at which point he told me that if I did it again I would be heading for A&E rather than England, with at least one broken leg. To make sure I understood, shortly after he gave me a little down payment by way of an elbow to the mouth, leaving me with a scar to this day, and I decided to keep my tricks to myself.
It was the roughest introduction to senior football; every week I strapped my ankles tightly as some level of protection against the kicks and stud rakes. At first I took it all personally, but then I realised that it’s all to stop you scoring and is a funny form of compliment; if they weren’t worried about what I might do with the ball, I’d be ignored completely.
Times have changed in so many ways; those Irish games, or indeed games I then played in Scotland and the lower leagues in England, were full of tough and uncompromising characters, and that was just the tea ladies. But the game has become far less tolerant of dangerous play, and in many leagues (including the A-Leagues) it’s almost impossible to get away with anything off the ball.
At the top level, defending has also become far more about anticipation and interception; the crowd still loves an old-fashioned crunching tackle from their centre-back but, like with bouncers in cricket, you know that referees will only let a certain amount happen.
You look at the very elite now, players who were in the Premier League when I was like John Terry, Rio Ferdinand, Gerard Pique, they were all good in the air, quick and brilliant readers of play. They all had a nasty streak – they had to – but very rarely got flustered.
Across the world now the ways defenders try to put you off have become a bit more subtle, but just as antagonising. There’s a certain breed of centre-back that I played against in the A-League who are brilliant at what they do, but all have their little attributes.
Players like Nigel Boogaard, Nikolai Topor-Stanley, Jade North, Matt Jurman, Taylor Regan are what I call old-school – not a throwback to the legalised violence I got in my early days, but in the sense that they would be all over you, constantly jostling and annoying, blocking your space whether the ball was in the vicinity or not.
They’d start the physicality in the tunnel before the game if the ref wasn’t looking (with a smile), they’d give you just enough of a clatter near the halfway line for the ref to leave his cards in his pocket early on… and then, at the end of the game, they’d shake your hand, have a chat, and leave it all out on the pitch.
Boogaard in particular ended up a good mate of mine when I signed for Newcastle, and it amused me no end to see players reacting to his verbal’s and confrontational tactics, even though it sometimes had the air of a pantomime villain. But it worked; my time at the Mariners nearly had the worst possible start when we played Newcastle in a pre-season friendly in Tamworth that descended into chaos after Nigel and I got into a little disagreement. Job done, as far as he was concerned.
He had a particular obsession with stopping Besart Berisha, and was hugely proud of the fact that in five years and 10 games for Newcastle against the A-League’s greatest ever goalscorer, Berisha only scored twice. Funny what excites some people.
Nikolai on the other hand was always quiet – eerily quiet, in the sense of never knowing when he was nearby. I tried some old-fashioned tactics, a bit of jostling, to try to get under his skin; he just stared at me with this expressionless look, like a Zen defender. In some ways that was almost more unnerving than a bit of confrontation.
But they all knew how to be effective and were brilliant at what I hated – not the abuse or the sledges, which I could tune out from, but the harassment, death by a thousand nudges. You’d set up for a run and they’d block you, or they’d crowd you so the next time you played the ball away first touch, only to realise they’d dropped off and you looked a bit silly – so then the time after you’d take two touches and suddenly be in a heap with a grinning centre-back standing over you.
They’re a different breed, defenders. Thankfully for my ankles, that breed has changed a bit since I was a teenager all those years ago.
