What do the Pucela fans prefer at this point in the championship? Play well being very superior and draw or lose? Or play ugly and win? Pacheta’s decisions condemn Real Valladolid, both in the good and in the bad. It is one thing to be a brave coach, with an attacking style of football, and another to be a suicidal coach. What you have won during the 90 minutes cannot escape you in the added game, and Pucela is losing many points in the final stages of the matches. Even a purist of the beautiful and offensive game like Pep Guardiola, he had to resort to that “other” football to get through the Champions League quarter-final tie against Cholo Simeone’s Atlético de Madrid. At this point in the season, what counts are the points and not playing well or badly. It is necessary to be more practical and tie the results to try to ascend directly to First. The alarming inability of Real Valladolid to manage a positive result could be the difference between going up directly or having to play the playoffs, having spectacular full-backs in the team, midfielders with incredible quality and the leading scorer in the Smartbank League.
Pacheta is not the prototype of the pragmatic coach that Second Division teams hire to try to ascend to the gold category of professional football. The usual thing is that football teams in this category sign a type of coach specialized in tying up the results, whether it is a draw in a foreign field or a 1-0 victory. The basis of his system is the defensive lock, a certain tactical lethargy that helps to confuse the games and the good physical background, in addition to the directionality of the pitch in the practice of the counterattack. The football of these coaches is a little evolved and technically ugly sport, although effective in a world where there is a lot of demand and the results determine the bipolar mood of the partners. Then the saying reigns that the best attack is a good defense, so if you don’t concede goals, you don’t lose.
The coach from Burgos is currently using a game system that penalizes the team’s top scorer, Shon Weismann, who is very alone up front. The same thing happened with the 5-3-2, which Pacheta opted for at the beginning of the season, with three central defenders and two long lanes. It was shown that it did not work and the footballers themselves suggested a change of drawing. The system that has given the team the most and best results this season has been 4-4-2both in play and in results. Little is said about defensive football at Real Valladolid, but the reality is that rival teams hurt them with very little. I suppose that the tactical concepts are being transformed and the speed of the touch goes beyond the fashion of the conservative game. The strategic intelligence of this new batch of technicians like Pacheta aspires to dismantle the controlled sensationalism of coaches with an older book, to park the dubious sex appeal of the supporters of effective boredom. With the one in Salas de los Infantes, talent, quality and innovation prevail even over the result and that is dangerous, because in soccer they only remember those who win and not how they did it.