Why is everyone talking about rest defence? (w. Stephen Russell)
Tifo Football Podcast
The Athletic
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2024
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jon Mackenzie is joined by Stephen Russell to discuss the most important aspects of rest defence.
What is rest defence?
Why is it important? Why do coaches worry about it?
What tactical shifts have prompted this?
What are the two key variables of rest defence?
This episode of the Tifo Football Podcast is presented by Jon Mackenzie, produced by Mike Zimmermann.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The Athletic. |
| 0:07.8 | Hello and welcome to the TIFO football podcast. |
| 0:10.6 | I'm John McKenzie and happy new year to my good friend and producer Mike Zimmerman. |
| 0:15.2 | Mike, how are you doing? |
| 0:16.7 | Happy New Year, John. |
| 0:17.7 | 2023 was great. |
| 0:19.2 | And here's to an even better 2024. |
| 0:21.7 | Yeah, and we're jumping straight in with the good stuff in 2024. |
| 0:25.5 | This is a podcast that is all about rest defense. |
| 0:28.3 | It's a concept tactically that people have been talking about a lot in the last few seasons. |
| 0:32.8 | What we've done is we've brought in one of the world experts on rest defense. |
| 0:36.2 | Stephen Russell is an academic who's just |
| 0:38.2 | written a master's thesis on the concept. So we're here to talk all things rest defense, what it is, |
| 0:43.9 | what it means, what coaches can learn from it, why it's important. You've just listened to that |
| 0:47.8 | conversation. What did you make of it? For me, it's kind of the two key variables that Stephen |
| 0:52.3 | talked about compactness and proximity, the pros and cons of each, |
| 0:55.6 | and basically what exactly each are used for. Yeah, and we actually end up straying into the weird |
| 1:00.9 | and wonderful by the very end, talking about how it is that we even analyze football from |
| 1:05.6 | qualitative and quantitative perspective. So lots of really fun stuff for us to get into there. So hopefully everyone isn't |
| 1:12.3 | feeling too lethargic after their Christmases and their New Year's. But the best thing for us to do, |
| 1:16.9 | as it always is in these podcasts, is for us to just jump straight over to talk to our guests. So |
| 1:21.4 | Stephen Russell is going to talk to us all about rest defence. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Athletic, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Athletic and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.