- Jul 4, 2012
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You make some good points, but a lot of them rely on everyone being fit and being able to play 90 mins.People are committing the sin of equating correlation with causation, without bothering to explain exactly why the two are the same.
The game changed completely in the second half. N'dombele got dubbed off for Lo Celso who came on and had a great game while Kane and Son tore Southampton to shreds.
Apparently Mourinho deserves credit for swapping off N'dombele for Lo Celso so if you're going to state that (and especially if you're going to slag everyone off for questioning it at the time) then you should explain why exactly N'dombele deserved to come off rather Winks.
What we needed was for creative players to regularly get the ball in space and start hitting good balls behind the Southampton press, in co-ordination with actual runs being made by the forwards.
The reason that failed to happen in the first half but happened in the second half is because Southampton worked and tackled themselves bloody during the first half. More than that, we failed to hurt them and they started getting a fuck ton of success with their press.
An intense pressing game requires total commitment, if you half arse it is worse than never attempting it. The more success they got the more confident they got the more they pressed, the more they pressed the more success they got and the more they pressed. It's a feedback loop and the failure of our midfield to break that press and assert themselves on the game just fed into that loop.
The main thing that changed the game was not N'dombele coming off. He was one of the few players that actually broke their press and opened up space a couple of times. He did it for Son's equaliser. Winks however spent the entire first half much the same as he did the entire Everton game, just going through the motions. Tippy, tappy back and forward. He never asserted himself on that game or did anything to damage Southamptons confidence in pressing him or the rest of the side. Twice in fact he actually fucked us up when breaking their press.
You know what other things correlated with the game turning around? The length of time that the game went on. You know what else correlated with the game changing? Kane and Son, out of nowhere, tearing their high line a new arsehole a couple of times. When a team works itself to the bone tackling and pressing, they get tired. Southampton got tired and it opened us space because they didn't stop pressing. Kane and Son took advantage of that and it broke their confidence in pressing. They still kept pressing but now as a unit they weren't committed.
Lo Celso coming on took full on advantage of this and deserves all the credit he's got. Mourinho though probably doesn't and needs to sort out the team system to start minute one of the next match, rather than trying to fix it at half time and blaming his players.
It sounds like I'm shitting on Winks here but in the system that Mourinho has tried to play, he is required to step up and run the game. If he doesn't do that then he's a passenger.
It’s very clear that not all of our players can at the moment (even moreso with trying to manage fitness for the glut of games we have), so we’re currently trying to manage what we have available, and what we had available was a Winks that was fit enough to play 90, and two other mids that definitely were not.