EPT----
I have a friend from university that sometimes invites me to futsal games with some miscellaneous other people from the university Futsal group where I still play. They are weekly games versus a local team, -- I don't really know who they are, but they're all a bit older and not typically very athletic. It's not a very fair match-up, the four times that I played before today we all managed to win comfortably using superior athletic ability and technical skills.
We used to play at a gymnastics center with an appropriately sized hall suitable for various things like futsal, basketball, indoors hockey, handball. The normal match-up is five vs five, with the implicit agreement that the goalie never ventures beyond the half line. Starting from today however, the field would be booked on our regular playing hours, and as compensation we were offered (by the municipal government that regulates this) the use of another facility. This one wasn't quite so exclusive and fancy though, and was situated in what has to be the most impoverished neighborhood of the city (also the one where I live >.<).
I arrived this evening for the first time and prospected the playing hall to see if it would stand up to scrutiny, but to my disbelief it seemed to fall short of my expectations, literally in that it was only two thirds the size of a normal field. We decided to make the best of the situation by playing four versus four, but it turned into an hour of hardly endearing anti-football.
There are some tactical and strategical aspects about football that you start to take for granted, but which are really features of the environment. You can suddenly find yourself unable to translate your skills to adapt to the new environment because your intuition fails you, everything you attempt is wrong because you were operating under conditions that no longer apply.
Let's take some examples: by eliminating space you create an inability to engage in combinations or solos because you are easily pushed out of the field or blocked by the goalkeeper, you are furthermore punished because in losing the ball the opponent has such an immediate and overwhelming numerical advantage it becomes very easy to convert. The situations are very simple and they demand rigor, a disciplined approach to play where you can not afford to lose and can try to create your own opportunities by taking risks. It's easy to see that a defensive and conservative approach will net you results.
By playing four vs four on a small field you can use the goalie in the attack creating a perpetual majority situation where always at least one of the players has freedom to shoot. You can't chase with more than one person because it is very easy to exploit such aggressive play.
Our team is not disciplined, because we take different players from the university group every time, because we don't know each other that well, because we have a fondness for tricky and risky play, because we rotate goalies. We failed this evening in this environment and our opponents took advantage of our discord by utilizing a simple tactic: give all balls to their one capable player and have him score from a distance.
I have to admit I got KINDA tired of him standing at the back threatening to either shoot or pass right at the start of every play, since I was the person constantly giving chase. He hit me quite hard multiple times, and I thought it was rather cynical to use the opponent's fear of being hit as the basis for threats. At times I felt like it was target practice.
It's just anti-football, I hated it, and the fact someone said it was "fun" because we had the chance to score more often and because it was more action-packed just makes me lose faith in humanity. Something is wrong when after an hour of play it's 22-17, you're not supposed to score that often in football. I've started to really appreciate how field and team size affect the strategy of the game and how easy it is to mess with it and creating something which no longer resembles proper football.
Anyhow...
