Another day, another stalling thread. You often hear that 'stalling' isn't a problem, because 'stalling' is a fundamental part of the game. Why?

First, let's take the 'standard' 2-1 strategy. You force them to score early, grind out a slow score in reply, then grind out another 8 turn score. Voila, Basher 101, basic strategy.

Let's look at this from the defense perspective though, facing this strategy.

When you attack the ball, you should be assuming you fail . If you succeed, you've scored, so great, so what happens when you fail? Typically, a failure will still leave his offense in a sticky situation. You'll have multiple players in contact, and usually, one player next to the ball. He needs to block all your players away and reform his cage somewhere safe.

If you've been assuming you might fail, then usually, the only 'safe' place to reform a cage is to move backwards a few squares. An offense usually can't spare enough man power to move forward safely and clear all your players out of contact.

So, it comes down to the timing of the attack. If you attack the ball early, you give them time to reform the cage, and the sacrifices your players made (staying in contact...) are wasted. If you attack later in the half, then most teams do not have enough time to move backwards and still score.

This forces them to make an unsafe move up the field, which exposes them to your true attack the turn after, the point where the ball is actually vulnerable.

So, for the first 3-5 turns of the half, you both actually share an objective. You don't want to do a risky attack, because he still has time to reform the cage, and he doesn't want you to attack (because he might lose the ball on a 6).

What are you both doing then? You are maneuvering for position. Remember, the whole point of the 'double attack' is to force them to have to expose the ball carrier if they want to score, and the massive elephant in the room is that requires them to be out of range of scoring when they fall back.

Hence, all that matters for the first few turns is territory. The Offense is attempting to gain squares, so they have room to fall back, and the Defense is seeking to deny the squares or allow the Offense to advance in such a way that they have nowhere to fall back to and are forced to score too early.

This is where screening comes into play. The basic screen is a double layered screen (aka, a line of players, usually double separated, with a second line of players directly behind). You haven't enough players to screen the entire pitch, but what you can do is funnel them. If you have 3 blocks of 2 players, and then one block of one on the edge, the only way they can move forward is to blitz off that one and move the cage to where they were. Once they do that, you can move the side of your screen around to cut off their return.

You are both jockeying for position at this phase. You want to funnel them with the "weak" point of the screen into a bad position (usually pressed up against the sidelines), and they want to force your screen to expose more weak points than you want. This is where skills like Guard and Sidestep come into their own. If one player has significantly more Guard than the other, they can just hit contact in such a way that the other player cannot block them free. This forces them to have to move their screen to respond to the opening, and ties up players.

That's why I don't see an 8 turn drive as "stalling". To me the game is that struggle between offense and defense, the timing, and the attempts to force the other to leave a hole in the wrong place. It's about predicting where they want to move, and ensuring that you reinforce in just the right place. It's about seeming to leave a gap, except that gap is the opening to a trap that allows you to close your players around them, forcing them to either give up the ball or score. It's knowing that in a few short turns time, s*** is going to hit the fan, and making sure that when things go crazy, you are in the better position to come out on top.

The rest of the game is really just icing adding depth and options to the strategical cake.