Bosz's PSV are the world's in-form team and one of the most exciting

With PSV 2-0 down to Sevilla with just over half an hour to go and on the verge of being all but knocked out of the Champions League, Peter Bosz brings on an attacking midfielder for one of his centre-backs. The attacking move pays off with his side drawing level 20 minutes later, turning things around after seeing their opponents go down to 10 men.

The Dutchman's team is now set to take home a point that will leave them with a decent chance of escaping their group heading into the final game, so he won't take too many risks, right?

Wrong. Instead, despite the fact that Sevilla will now go all-out attack to get the goal they need to survive, he immediately takes off his other centre back and the defensive midfielder that was filing in alongside him, bringing on an attacking full back and a striker in their place, leaving his team without any natural central defenders.

It would be something of a shock if most managers did this, but PSV fans have come to expect it from theirs and are all too happy to embrace the carnage because it's been working a treat.

That night in Spain, the striker that Bosz brought on, Ricardo Pepi, scored the winning goal to send PSV into the knockout stages, and when asked about his substitutions afterwards, the manager simply stated that losing 2-0 was no better than losing 4-0, so why not go for it?

It's a high-risk high-reward strategy, and so far the rewards couldn't have been higher.

Things have gone well in the Champions League, with the side bouncing back from a heavy defeat to Arsenal by getting a win and a draw against both Lens and Sevilla to secure their place in the next round, and things in the Eredivisie have been nothing short of remarkable: 14 matches, 14 wins, 50 goals for, six goals against.

When Bosz took over from Ruud van Nistelrooy in June, he took over a club that was the second-strongest in the Netherlands at best, with them failing to really challenge Arne Slot's Feyenoord for the 2022/23 title.

They most likely wouldn't have even finished second to the Rotterdam side if not for Xavi Simons, so even the most optimistic PSV fans wouldn't have been too hopeful of them taking the fight to Slot and Co this season when their wunderkind was re-signed by PSG and loaned out to RB Leipzig in July.

That changed a few weeks later when the Eindhoven side claimed a deserved 1-0 victory over the reigning league champions to win the Dutch Super Cup, and that proved to be a sign of things to come.

While they don't have a star player as they did with Xavi - although Joey Veerman, Johan Bakayoko, Noa Lang and Luuk de Jong have all been excellent - they're operating better than even as a team, producing some of the most thrilling football seen in Europe's top leagues this season.

One of the closest disciples of Johan Cruyff in modern football, their manager has become renowned for his extremely attacking brand of football - widely known as 'BoszBall' in the Netherlands - over the years.

Like his biggest inspiration, his priority is to dominate possession, by playing out from the back and winning the ball back as quickly as possible when it's lost, preferably within five seconds.

Adopting the five-second rule as he calls it is risky, with the defensive line having to stay high and players having to move out of position to press the opponent, but he has little concern for that, preferring to win 4-3 than 1-0.

This approach was always likely to produce fireworks against the weaker sides in the Eredivisie, and it's done just that, with the team winning by a margin of three goals or more on nine occasions, scoring at least four goals in seven matches.

The worry was that the team's style would be too attacking to work against stronger opponents, and those worries looked to be justified when Arsenal beat them 4-0 in their opening Champions League clash.

However, since then, BoszBall at PSV - unlike in his previous spells at Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen and Lyon, where defensive frailties ultimately cost him his job - has delivered just as well against top sides as it has against weak ones.

Ahead of their crucial Champions League match with Lens, it felt inevitable that PSV's stunning run of form would come to an end with tricky trips to FC Twente, Sevilla and Feyenoord on the horizon, but they went on to win all four of those matches.

The most impressive victory was their one in Rotterdam, with them deservedly beating their title rivals to move 10 points clear despite missing two of their key players, Lang and Hirving Lozano.

Bosz did it his way, too. Knowing that Feyenoord would attack his side from the off given they had to win, he didn't do what most managers would do when heading into a match with a seven-point lead at the top of the table and prioritise defensive solidity, instead taking out one of his centre backs and moving midfielder Jerdy Schouten into the backline.

His reasoning, in true Cruyff fashion, was that the best way to stop Feyenoord from scoring wasn't to defend well, but to stop them from attacking altogether as much as they could, by keeping possession themselves.

"Ultimately, we concluded that you can try to defend and prevent them from scoring a goal, but we preferred that they have to chase after the ball instead," he said after the match.

"That's why we decided to put a midfielder at the back.

"A risk? I don't think so. If you defend for ninety minutes, you will lose, so we came here to win."

And win they did, taking more shots on goal and recording a higher xG in a deserved 2-1 victory that put them 10 points clear at the top of the league, ahead of a Feyenoord side that has beaten Lazio and Roma in the last year and is managed by someone attracting interest from the world's biggest clubs.

It's a start to the season that hasn't been seen in top-level football anywhere else in the world in 2023 and hasn't been seen in the Netherlands since 1987 when Guus Hiddink's Champions League-winning PSV side won their opening 17 matches.

While domestic success seems guaranteed, winning a Champions League themselves may be too tall an order for this generation. However, after seeing rivals Ajax and Feyenoord make their mark in Europe in recent times, reaching a Champions League semi-final and Conference League final respectively, they now look capable of doing so themselves.

Given their kamikaze approach, whether their run in the knockout rounds will be a long one is far from certain, but you can bet your life that it will be a fun one. In Bosz's eyes at least, that's what football is all about.

"I want to entertain the fans in the stadium," he once said.

"People should see a great game. When I go home, I should say: 'Wow, that was exciting.'"

In Eindhoven, Bosz - along with everyone who watches his team - certainly is.