The truth is marching on

Just like every art form, football has ideal and global standards. Visual beauty may depend on the observer, but its methods are roughly the same everywhere. Players, fans and coaches, they all have a different perception of what is going on in the game, but when it comes to scoring and winning, the mathematics of football applies everywhere. Thus, the two righteous teams of Turkish football, Amedspor and Beşiktaş, continue to dominate the Turkish Cup with their mathematically and philosophically superior game.

First of all, the way they play, a quasi neo-total football, does not let their opponent to create attacks for two reasons. First, the intense pressure on the opponent's defense builds a tough barrier against build-up passes and mostly leads to dangerous interceptions around the penalty box. Second, given this fact, the opponents struggle to create attacking waves and eventually forward players retreat into defense in order to help carry the ball into the other half. Nevertheless, this move naturally results in an opponent being trapped in their own half, unable to produce anything dangerous given the insufficient time and space. Thus, almost all the offensive threat posed by the opponent is eliminated while the ball-possession-based team can easily get defensive players involved in the attack.

Afterwards, the game actually turns into a ping-pong competition. As we observed throughout the Amedspor-Bursaspor game and in the second half of the Beşiktaş-Bucaspor game, when the situation I explained happens, the momentum shifts to continuous one-sided offensive waves. Opportunities maybe missed, balls may be lost but you intercept and reorganize again multiple times given the whole occasion occurs in the opponents half and around their penalty box. Then, the only thing needed is to implement an effective and sustainable final offensive plan.

However, unfortunately no Turkish team is able to execute a sophisticated and pre-planned strategy before execution yet. Even Beşiktaş and Amedspor rely on their talented players creating a chaotic situation to derive opportunities. But this kind of an offensive approach severely damages the effectiveness of the first steps of the general strategy. Seeing as chaos cannot be controlled and serves both sides, the trapped opponent finds momentary occasions to shine and disrupt your plan. Admittedly, the whole legend of Jose Mourinho has risen from this deficiency of the teams that prefer neo-total football and chaos was the main reason for the counter-attack's success in the past.

Nevertheless, both Beşiktaş and Amedspor represent the universal truths of football and their success would be beneficial for both Turkish and global football. Thus, rather than ignoring their success from an ideologically biased point of view, we must promote them to shape the future of our football. We must always remember that both teams started the season investing on their present squad, did not spend millions and Amedspor does not even have a foreign player. They are building a native national football style, and it is almost comparable with international standards. All you have to do is to acknowledge this revolution, the truth will do the rest.