Forget your Opta statistics and all that fancy Dan touchscreen analysis that Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher do on the telly, if you want to prove a point about a football match you’re watching, you don’t have to go to great lengths.
Take ‘Red Monday’ for example. With Jose Mourinho’s Manchester United finding a way of halting Jurgen Klopp’s free-flowing attacking juggernaut of a Liverpool side from gegenpressing them into oblivion, it didn’t take long before some were trotting out the old ‘parked the bus’ metaphor.
And what better way to highlight United’s constant uber-defensive tactics at Anfield than pointing to one still image taken from 90 minutes plus stoppage time of football?
Here it is…
Those blue shirts. Just look at ’em all, virtually piled up on top of each other. Clearly, from this solitary still image, we can see that the whole match was backs to the wall defending for United.
You’d never see a Klopp Liverpool side getting bodies behind the ball, would you?
But the many that have retweeted this image of United’s Anfield roadblock are dead right. You can learn an awful lot about a football match from one single image.
Sticking with United for another example of this, who can forget the time they flooded their defence to edge past Arsenal, 8-2?
And what about that time that Germany parked their bus in order to grind out a 7-1 World Cup semi-final win over Brazil?
Or that time when English defenders tightly marked Icelandic players for the duration of their Euro 2016 last 16 clash in Nice?
Given that we can learn so much about an entire match by just glimpsing at a single image, it’s hardly any wonder that Sky’s viewing figures have reportedly dropped by 19%. In this hectic, fast-paced world in which we find ourselves, why bother watching an entire game when we can learn so much in just a matter of seconds?
