On 30 April 2019, during post-match coverage of a Champions League game, Graeme Souness, the irascible former Liverpool player and manager, declared that a game of football is “quite simple”. If you’re “first to the ball”, he said, tactics might come into play. But if you’re “second to the ball”, tactics go “out the window”. “I’m fed up with people talking bull about tactics and formations… Get first to the ball, you’ve got a chance in football. Don’t get first to the ball – you got no chance. Simple as.”
At 1:51 am the same night, Michael Cox, the football journalist and founder of the tactics website Zonal Marking, retweeted footage of Souness’s rant, accompanied by a crying-laughing emoji, to his 240,000 followers. Of the 50 replies prompted by Cox’s tweet, most agreed that Souness was, in the words of one user, “Dinosouness”– a relic of a bygone age, when football was all about headers and tackles and just “wanting it more”. As Cox wrote in the resulting Twitter thread, Souness’s no-nonsense conception of football “is completely out of keeping with the approach of every top-level manager”.
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