The Breakdown: Top 5 Copa America goal from the week explained
By Ryan Wrenn
It’s been one week since the first ball in the Copa America was kicked, and boy have we seen some crackers. Ryan Wrenn breaks down some of the best strikes from the tournament thus far…
Each week during the Copa América, we here at Playing for 90 are going to compile a handful of goals and try to break down the mechanics of how, and why, they were scored (or conceded).
The overall tactics of any given match can at times feel inadequate when describing goals. At best they can give you the general story, the outline of how a game is won and lost. Neymar doesn’t practice specific types of goals from passes delivered to him at specific parts of the pitch. Rather, he’s positioned is such a way to get maximum value out of his set of talents. What he does to score or set up goals cannot be anticipated or planned around, just given the highest likelihood of being brought to bear.
More from Copa America
- Reflecting on Lionel Messi’s Copa America triumph
- Roberto Firmino and Gabriel Jesus proving they can play together
- Colombia open Copa America with dominant win over Argentina
- Neymar injury forces Brazil star out of Copa America
- Chile, the champion no one cared about
It’s been said that from a tacticians point of view, the perfect game of football should end 0-0, each teams’ tactics perfectly balanced with the other. Tactics, then, are the ideal, the best case scenario, and goals are the result of those tactics breaking down on some level.
Nevertheless, what we learn from analyzing goals can be invaluable. The goals in the slideshow below tell stories about how tactics succeeded and failed, about the state of the game at that particular moment and even about the psychology of the players.