If you've followed my account for a while you would have noticed my fascination with diagonality, a concept which is at the heart of a lot of my work. For a while I've been sharing clips and commenting on teams putting this concept into practice, occasionally sharing ideas on how to train this as well. The word itself is becoming more used in discourse but, like most terminology, can get misinterpreted or reduced. When Coach of PSG's U18 team, former Italian International and recent ex Juventus coach Thiago Motta once famously said- ''I don't see formations vertically, I see them horizontally. We play a 2-7-2*'' *the goalkeeper acts as part of the midfield 7. For many years I didn't quite understand what Motta was referring to, that is a pretentious way of articulating something rather simplistic like verticality. What did Motta mean with these comments? Could it be that he was referring to diagonality? I wanted to write something that speaks to th...