- Aug 22, 2014
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No, not meant to feel sarcastic, as keen to understand how you view our tactics, because I'm struggling to get a real feel of where we are trying to go. Interested to get others views that's all
Ah okay, apologies.
First of I'd say I was a huge fan of the Real Madrid team that Jose managed, they had an incredible counter attacking team which scored a ridiculous amount.
I think the way we're trying to set up at the moment is to have a system where out of possession we are in a 4-5-1 and in possession we want to have 5 players behind the ball and 5 players in-front of it in the attacking third. We're going at it differently to how Liverpool achieve this who push both fullbacks up and look like this:
Matip Van Dijk
Hendo Fabinho Wijnaldum
Trent Salah Firmino Mane Robertson
And city go for inside FB's but also have the 5-5
Otamendi Laporte
Walker Fernandinho Zinchenko
KDB Silva
Mahrez Aguero Sterling
So we're going trying to achieve the same thing but by having a half and half of Liv/city set up by having the one fullback pushed up, I think what Jose initially wanted with our set up was this:
Sanchez Alder Davies
Lo Celso Ndombele
Aurier Moura Kane Dele Son
So we're trying to get the same set up which is based on stopping teams from being able to counter you with a base from behind and overloading the box and creating width in the final third which I'm a fan of. beyond that I'm a little concerned with just how much we're using Alderweireld to ping balls long, now and then I think it's great but we need to do a better job of keeping possession and working through the middle. The problem I see is that right now we don't have a player to hold the ball up and allow our 2 wingers to play off of which we saw Dele do last night and we know that Kane can do.
Now I'm not sure at this point whether we're purposefully not controlling the play in the middle or it's a case of that against City we were simply up against the better team and against Southampton we didn't have the right personnel and had to play a different formation to compensate. My opinion is that the current style isn't intentional and that our plans are to build a midfield which can dictate the play more but also set up to have the devastating counter attacks that we saw when Jose was at Madrid and Inter and that we've seen Liverpool set up like more recently. I think we will see the best of both worlds where we won't keep possession for possession sake similar to how Spain set up but we also won't keep seeing the same current style of play that we have.
Clearly Jose needs time and the personnel available to set up what he wants but I think we're at an interesting dilemma where he's going to have been impressed with Winks and may consider wanting a trio of Winks/Lo Celso/Ndombele but conversely he loves having his third midfielder be a 8/10 hybrid where they're not afforded the luxury of a 10 in terms of workload and expects them to put in a shift defensively. Dele was seemingly the choice for that but now I wonder whether he will prefer the midfield 3 I mentioned and that makes you wonder where Dele fits if he decides to go with the Bergwijn/Kane/Son set up which suits perfectly his old set ups. Right now I'd for sure be playing Dele in the false 9 whilst Kane is absent.
So right now my opinion is that what we're seeing performance wise isn't great but this isn't going to be the style for long, I think Jose's detractors focus on the style during the bad times and fail to take into account when it's at it's peak. I think we will end up playing through midfield a lot more than people expect and I think we will enjoy the velocity of how we move the ball from back to front where as before we were too laboured with the ball and spent far too much time going sideways as our performances under Poch began to hit the downward trend. If people think we're simply going to be a long ball counter team who gives up possession under Jose then they're going to be pleasantly surprised once we're in full swing in my opinion.
I'm not necessarily enjoying the performances at the moment but I can see the bigger picture and understand the necessity as we're in a transitional phase over the next 6 months, I'd say us fans would do well to probably just enjoy the results and also the individual players develop such as Lo Celso and Tanganga but also seeing our midfield slowly begin to take shape as people begin to get defined responsibilities such as Winks and how they take to those roles and kick on. I think there's still a lot to enjoy despite the performances and that that will improve come next season.