The Central Midfield Thread

DGM defensively good midfielder

I hate abbreviations

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Someone who plays like a metronome. Maybe someone who can slow the tempo down then accelerate it.

LOL! WR, “Hate” is such a strong word WTF. Nvm, AFAIK you were only being sarcastic…LMK.

XOX

They’re initialisms. HTH.

:nerd_face:

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Reporting you guys to AAAA. Association Against Acronym Abuse.

They really missed a trick by not calling themselves AAA

Don’t You mean… IHA
:upside_down_face:

That is what we NEED, please, please, please

I’ve been thinking when did the term defensive midfielder enter the football dictionary. Who would you class as the first Liverpool player to be specifically labelled with this title.

In England probably around the late 90s. We started seeing an increase in foreign players come to the prem a few years prior and with that came the introduction of different sorts of players than we were used to seeing. That required the fans to develop a bit more of a sophisticated (only a bit) view of tactics (the evolution away from 4-4-2) and develop different language to talk about these new types of players and ideas. As a test case, think about Dunga - a world cup winning captain in 94 for Brazil, but he was largely derided in the UK by a collective football watching public who just couldnt get their head around the point of a player who had such a constrained role as he had

Our first who was acknowledged as such in the classic way was probably Didi. Of course there were earlier players who in retrospect that is what they would have been called had the term been in use. Ray Wilkins is a good example (hence his move to Italy). For a short period we had Spackman play in CM for us very effectively and looking back that is maybe how we’d have described how he played.

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Not until after the formation of the Prem era, I’m only young enough to have followed football from the mid 80s and the only positions I knew were sweepers, fullbacks, wingers and (center) forwards…nowadays I see DM’s as evolved sweepers as a lot of the roles of DM’s now covered a lot of the aspects of the game a sweeper did back then. I suppose you could’ve classed Mike Marsh and Nigel Spackman as DM’s but back then we didn’t really play with one…it was your traditional 442 Ray and Barnesy on the wings, Mcmahon and Whelan marshalling and then your boys up top.

Our first out and out DM we played with I’d agree was Didi.

Maybe the first was Molby…

Molby’s passing in the 86 Cup Final was a thing of beauty

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Isn’t DM just the updated version of midfield ‘hard men’? The David Battys, Roy Keanes, Vinnie Jones, Paul Inces? Different decade, different terminology, different formations, same job

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Yep. I would put (for example across eras) Souness and Redondo in the category of DM in the modern game. Both brilliant players mind, not as limited in the Batty or McMahon vein. Vinny Jones was just a clogger

McMahon was most definitely not a limited player.

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He is cf Souness & Redondo

So are 99.9% of midfielders if you’re comparing to those two.

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Hence the likes of McMahon sitting in a limited vein by comparison. I thought it was cynical and old rather than confused and crazy? :joy: