The Mysterious Position

Hello all, today we’re going to discuss about a position in the field which is quite mysterious to outsiders or less informed people, or the persons who are new to football and have recently started following it. The reason I call this position mysterious is because people often confuse this position with some other, and don’t get the importance and significance of it. For all of you who know about this position, might be aware that this position cannot and does not exist in all the formations, the manager has to place a special attention on the player operating in this position and has to use the player very carefully in order to fully exploit the benefits of it.

The position is known as the Support Striker (SS) position or the Centre Forward (CF) position or some people and managers may refer to this position as the False 9 position. The player operating in the SS position has a role of both the attacking mid fielder (CAM) and the number 9 striker. This player moves freely on the field comes into the mid field for linking up the chances and attacks, and also is available for finishing up the created chances. The main ability of this SS player is passing, vision, and shooting as this player is responsible for creating the chances for the team and also finishing them sometimes, in a way, the whole team heavily relies on the skills of this player. Keeping a SS player in the team is always beneficial as it provides the team with balance and support, and personally it is my favourite position for any player to play on, but at times the cost of keeping a SS player may outweigh the benefits of keeping this player, as when the whole team relies on this player for linking up the attacks and creating the chances through key passes, when this player does not perform up to the expectations from him, he might end up sinking the whole team down. So the manager needs to be extra careful while picking up this player as this fate of the team and the match might be decided by this player.

Some players who have performed in this position and have taken their team to new heights are Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi, Thomas Muller, Antoine Griezmann, Joao Felix etc. while some players like Maradona and Messi are so skilled and proficient in their playing, they can operate on various other positions like right wing, striker, attacking mid fielder, some players are naturally designed for this SS position and find it difficult in playing in other positions, examples of these players are Thomas Muller, Antoine Griezmann, and Joao Felix. With players like them on the team, the manager has to tweak the formation according to the style of play of these players in order to achieve the maximum potential, and that’s maybe on of the reasons why Antoine Griezmann is having a difficult time in Barcelona, because he’s not getting the position that he is naturally designed to play on, which is evident when he plays for the French national team, where he performs far better than in Barcelona.

Formations which make use of the SS position are 4-3-3 False 9, 3-5-2 with a SS, 4-2-3-1 with a SS, 4-4-2, 4-1-2-1-2 with a SS etc

I’ve explained the 4-3-3 false 9 formation, check it out here: https://mihirfootball.blogspot.com/2020/08/tactics-guide-4-3-3-false-9.html