Welcome to The Breakdown, where Angel City players break down the basics of the game to help you understand what they do on the pitch. This week, we talk to defender Megan Reid.
AngelCity.com: Broadly speaking, there are two categories of defender in soccer: center backs and outside backs (also called fullbacks). Those names refer to whether they defend in the center of the back line, or out on the wings. What’s your job as a center back, and how is it different from what the outside backs do?
Megan Reid: I like to think of your center backs as your pace setters. You're responsible for seeing everything in front of you and reading what the other team is doing—how fast you need to play, or whether can you break a line, meaning can you dribble past an opponent, or can you pass past them, to break that first line of pressure? That’s what we do when the team is attacking.
Defensively, your job is to be good in the air, good one v one, and kind of be aggressive and gritty and make tackles.
Outside backs, those are people that are really good at running, they have great stamina. They're usually very technical, and can cut inside with the ball off the sideline. They also have to be very, very good one-v-one defenders. A lot of what goes along with that is being able to stop crosses into the box as much as possible.
ACFC: When you talk about breaking a line or breaking the first line of pressure, what does that mean?
MR: Basically, think of center forwards. If I have the ball, the other team’s center forward is their first line of defense, meaning they’re going to try to take the ball from me to score. So say there's one center forward. Breaking that line means, how can we get the ball past them? One way you can do that is to get past them with two of our players—so we create an overload, or a numbers advantage, in a certain area, and pass the ball past them. Then we can go down one sideline or the other.
ACFC: As a center back, what do you need from the players around you in order to do your job the best?
MR: You need a goalkeeper—or anyone around you, it can be your other center back or your outside back—telling you where pressure is coming from. You need midfielders on the ball that are comfortable facing their own goal and playing one-twos around attacking players. You need an attacking player that's able to, if you hit them a long ball, take it with their chest and be able to hold up play until another attacker can get there. So there's a whole multitude of responsibilities that the center back needs in order to work well with the rest of the team.
ACFC: You used to play center forward. Are there any skills that transferred well from that position to center back?
MR: There aren’t necessarily skills, but I would say knowing what forwards want to do, where they want to get to, and how they like to move helps me determine how I move as a center back. So the traits are very different in terms of what you do and how you play, but having that knowledge and having been in that place, it helps me to know how to defend.