Football is a very beautiful game. Football can be played by anyone, anywhere, and whenever. Everyone loves football games either as a hobby or being a business. Football has its own beauty starting from how to play, play tactics even the drama that takes place in the game.
The present, playing football is not just kicking the ball and scoring goals. Every coach or manager of the club has its own means or tactics to win the game. One of them is Tiki-Taka, which is the trademark of Barcelona game.
Tiki-taka is playing with short-pass and accurate. Tiki-taka has been started since Johan Cruyff as a manager of Barcelona in 1988 to 1996 with a 4-3-3 formation. However, Barcelona's tiki-taka style led to greater success when Josep Guardiola become manager of Barcelona in 2008 till 2012, and bring out generations of players who are often small but technically talented players, like Xavi Hernandez, Andrés Iniesta, Cesc Fàbregas, and Lionel Messi. They are regarded as a player with great touch, vision, good pass, and excellent in keeping the ball possession.
Xavi Hernandez says, Tika-Tika is based on a practice called "el rondo". In this practice, one player is in the middle of the field and tries to take the ball from another player where they’re be rounded. This practice repeated regularly makes the players able to short pass accurately. This is also called triangulation. Meanwhile, Xabi Alonso says, we must learn how to control the ball, do the movement with or without the ball, go into the empty area to create opportunities.
Offensive
In the offensive phase, Barcelona always uses a combination of three players on the back line to build an attack. That combination of two center backs and a defensive midfielder with both fullbacks moving forward to take an attack. This strategy can be effective where Triangle will be formed between midfield players who can be easy to control the ball and pressing the opponent to make a mistake.
Defensive
When defend or counter-attack also interesting. Barcelona's defensive technique is on-front defense pressing system. Therefore Barcelona can be said to defend in front. This is true because Barcelona players had already pressing at ahead before the ball will go into their own defense area. The players' main focus is in half-space to do high pressing against to opponents. Thus, the opponent's options and space can be pressed as soon as possible to prevent a counterattack and get the ball back.
This strategy seems like Total Football philosophy, that is, all players do the same pressing and with the same timings as well. The schemes allow Barcelona to get ball possession and makes it easier to set the rhythm of the game. However, of the two systems, there is a weakness. Often times, Barcelona difficulties with counter-attacks where the ball directly leads to the back side where players on the side are overlapping, so the power of both center back and defensive midfielder very important to respond the counter-attack. As in the champions league semifinals in 2012, Tiki-taka defeated by the technique of defending "parking the bus" which was played by Chelsea with Roberto Di Matteo as manager of the club.
