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Chapter 440: Style of Play I

Jason and Ronaldo were on the field receiving a thigh massage during their rest period during team training.

Since the team had an upcoming match the very next day, their training sessions had been reduced quite a bit to avoid exhausting the players, though the players were not forbidden from getting a little extra training if they wished, they weren’t allowed to do anything too strenuous.

Of course, that instruction had flown into one ear of Ronaldo and out the other… well, not completely though.

He still went hard at training, but he didn’t push himself too much as he also knew that muscle exhaustion before a match would not help anybody.

However, Jason wasn’t as used to such crazy training as Ronaldo was.

He had thought he was since he trained almost round the clock even back at Porto, but Ronaldo’s training methods had let him know that his former methods of training had hardly been demanding on his body at all and were but a mere routine.

Ronaldo’s methods felt like he was personally breaking down his body and this let him know that there would definitely be improvements in his abilities in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.

For now though, he was worried about something else, something that threatened to rip apart his playing style.

Ever since facing up a more physical side to football here at training, he had noticed that his playing style of breaking through by using tricks to get past the defenders had lost almost all its effectiveness because of how physical these people were.

Funny enough, the problem wasn’t that they were too good, but rather that he wasn’t good enough to get past them without the threat of injury which was one thing Jason wanted to avoid if possible.

It wasn’t like he had lost his dribbling skills overnight, but rather it was how the Serie A defenders marked him and responded to his attempts at dribbling past them with tricks.

Anywhere he was constantly being followed by his marker and there were always enough players in the surroundings to immediately surround him once he received the ball.

Hence it was almost always him against two to three defenders whenever he received the ball, and unlike back at Porto where the standard of defenders was lower, the defenders were less physical, or they mostly employed zonal marking…

Here, the defenders were a lot better than before, they were a lot more physical and would not hesitate to pull him down when they couldn’t reach the ball, not to mention that they were very direct about their defending, none of that zonal marking thing where he would have time to settle on the ball and think of a way out before moving.

In this place, once he received the ball, he almost always usually had less than two seconds to escape from three very physical defenders who were almost always aiming to break his legs rather than to take the ball from him… only reason why they were holding back was that he was a member of the team and that this was a mere training session.

The way he had been managing to stay afloat was either by quickly laying off the ball or drawing back enough so that he wouldn’t be surrounded immediately he received the ball and that was tremendously dulling his attack sharpness and he didn’t like this so he had started thinking of a way to solve this problem, but it wasn’t easy for him to come up with anything so far.

If he couldn’t cause problems for the opposition defense, then there wouldn’t be much he was needed for on the pitch.

Uventus wasn’t a team that was short of players who could do regular things on the pitch so if he wanted to ensure that he had a place on the team, then he had to do the extraordinary, but that was slipping away from him.

In the end, he had asked Ronaldo for advice on how to go about dribbling in this league, but Ronaldo’s words for him weren’t an immediate solution to the problem.

What Ronaldo had said was that every player had their own signature playing style and the way to become the best version of oneself was to tap into that talent and develop it until it could safely take them to the top.

Every player’s shooting style, finishing style, dribbling style, and even running style was different. There could be similarities, but they were all inherently different and linked to who the player was as a person.

For example, Ronaldo’s style of dribbling used to be filled with tricks when he was much younger, but when he realized that he was better at scoring goals, he changed his dribbling to be the most effective way to get him into a shooting position turning him into someone who almost always let the ball fly whenever he dribbled past a player.

Messi was different in that aspect as he used the simplest of moves to get past his opponents and never resorted to flamboyant tricks because he never needed to do more than a simple feint.

Hazard was a feint-and-go type of dribbler, he would fake a move and confuse his opponents while he went the other way.

Neymar was someone who almost didn’t care for scoring and just had fun with the ball, resorting to all sorts of trickery even if he was going to end up shooting the ball wide.

After looking at all those players, Jason looked at himself and began to count out his own talents.

He used both flashy moves and simple moves to get past his opponent depending on the situation.

He had learned to use both legs at virtually the same rate and no longer felt any form of alienation whichever foot he used.

He was quickest after he started moving… that was to say, his initial burst of acceleration was when he was at his fastest and he could maintain his high pace for a while… literally, he was fast and had a high acceleration.

He had passable passing skills and could shoot well from any angle thanks to being able to use both his legs.

Just like that, he kept checking himself for what he could do and not do and it was only during this did he realize how far he had gone.

In his previous life, he hardly had any of these attributes.

His attributes weren’t talents, rather they were attributes he had drilled into himself year after year until he became who he currently was.

Improvement was impossible as he was already a fair distance away from his starting line. If he looked back, he could no longer see the shadow of who he was.

That was how far he had come.

The thought emboldened him and gave him confidence to take the next step forward which was creating a signature dribbling style.

Since he had internally noted all his attributes, he tried to summarize it and simplify everything and in the end two words stood out.