Synbad wrote:
explain to us how this gameplan is going to work after you have identified what it is were trying to do...
When you learnt how to read*, did someone drop the
Oxford English Dictionary in your lap and say "go"?
No; you learnt the alphabet, one letter at a time and began to associate phonetics to each letter, probably through some sort of visual aid. Eventually you got a really simple, possibly monosyllabic, book. You laboured over every single word almost as though you had never heard of them before. Then you went up a reading level, then another, and another; each a new challenge to be tackled and its lessons to be implemented on top of the rest of your growing vocabulary.
That's education in its simplest form. An introductory concept, then systematically providing further learning. In the pre-season, we go back to basics, assigning introductory and intermediate roles to a lot of players. Then we add a layer of complexity, then we add more layers. Perhaps in game, perhaps in match sim behind closed doors.
Having said that, the pre-season wouldn't be our own version of
Cat in the Hat, with the end product
The Art of War; I'd suggest the answer would be somewhere in-between for both. You can't give them all too much to remember while they're running around because they need to read into what the other is doing as well as their own tasks, and then anticipate and adapt to the game. Conversely, there should be much assumed knowledge.
But at the end of the day it's football, not rocket science, and there's only so many ways you can switch things around and fiddle with before it comes down to the skills of the individual. Given that limit of tactical depth, why the hell would you show case it all in pre-season matches?
Look where that got your buddy Dennis.
* - (for the purpose of my potentially self-indulgent spiel, I'm going to cast English as your first language)