Busting the myth of the false 9 - Chelsea at Old Trafford

Chelsea’s German forward Andre Schurrle (L) and Manchester United’s Welsh midfielder Ryan Giggs (R) compete during the English Premier League football match between Manchester United and Chelsea at Old Trafford in Manchester, northwest England, on August 26, 2013. (ANDREW YATES/AFP/Getty Images)

Much has been said about José Mourinho playing the apparent ‘false 9′ at Old Trafford a few days back. Although the subject of much discussion, there is a chain of thought that could show that he wasn’t really using a false 9 at all.

In the interest of providing a small insight into Mourinho’s tactics, we must first realize that Chelsea did not employ the false 9 strategy in the first place. Even though during the pre-match build-up the experts showed Hazard playing up top, Hazard was actually not moved from his position on the left at all. It was in fact Andre Schürrle who started up top for the Blues.

The most common misunderstanding is that if a midfielder is playing in a striker’s position he is playing as a false 9. That is actually not the case at all, as playing a midfielder up top is just playing him out of position. Granted that this switch in positional deployment mostly happens in a false 9 strategy, but that is only a part of it.

The main job of a false 9 is to drop back deeper than a striker generally would, and help the midfield trio (since it is generally employed in a standard 4-3-3) move the ball around and build a move while also running towards the goal for meeting a cross or just lurking at the edge of the box for the vital cut back, while never actually playing on the shoulder of the defender.

Schürrle, however, was constantly on the shoulder of either Vidic or Ferdinand, trying to run behind them to pull them away, just like a normal striker would do. It should be noted here that Schürrle has played as a striker quite a few times for his previous team, Bayer Leverkusen. José went with a counter-attacking line-up rather than risk one point for three. That much is evident by the way Chelsea played in the first half.

It may not have come off as he planned and expected, probably because his pivot of Ramires and Lampard never looked in shape to put the ball in the right places for Schürrle’s runs. Andre Schürrle did almost everything right; didn’t get caught offside often and gave the play-makers a vital option to release the ball straight ahead; the only thing he couldn’t do was actually get to the balls that the pivot (mainly Ramires, which was probably another flaw in the execution of the manager’s tactics) midfielders were managing to lump up towards him.

Its very simple really, Mourinho played safe; he made sure his defence was prioritized and well organized at all times and put out enough speed in the team to break quickly on the counter. Obviously the second part did not work out, and that could be down to a lot of factors, including fatigue and inexperience; but the defence held very strong for the whole of 90 mins. In a nutshell: did Mourinho implement a more defensive and cautious strategy than usual? Yes. Did he deploy the team without a ‘pure’ striker? Yes.But did he play the false 9? No.