Last month, Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard requested Arne Slot, his club’s incumbent manager, to stop complaining about “low block”. The phrase has recurred in most of Slot’s deconstruction of his team’s travails this season and a title defence scattered askance. But Slot dwelled on the phrase again, and retorted: “I can only agree with him, that I speak a lot about low blocks, because we face a lot of low blocks.” Gerrard’s contention was that teams defending deep in a compact shape is not a novel tactic. It has existed as long as the game itself, even though the phraseology has changed. From the blanket term “anti-football” to the more polished word of “catenaccio” and the gnomic “park the bus”, a term Jose Mourinho used rather derisively at an ultra-defensive Tottenham Hotspur in his earliest Chelsea avatar and which he himself later gloriously adopted to vivisect Barcelona’s tiki taka, defensive football has worn different garbs. Each one, though, has its own nuances and uniqueness. Park the bus often connoted full-throttle and cynical defending with little …