People say we lose to “anyone organized” I don’t really see any pattern other than our own energy levels. We’ve beaten and been beaten by all different types of team. From Liverpool and City to Leicester and Southampton.
The only real pattern I see is that we play a high risk, high reward style that relies on physical domination. When we can’t dominate the front third with our press and give the ball away with sloppy passes, we look way too easy to play through. When we can dominate teams physically, we suffocate them and give up very very little.
In practice there’s really not a lot difference to the way city play and the issues they had this season when they struggled physically.
Ange’s issue is not having no ideas, it’s that he’s stubborn about sticking to one idea.
The pattern I see is numerous teams finding us easy to play against because all you have to do is sit in, let us run very high up the pitch toward you and if you play out, you’re in.
The problem is, as you say, we like to physically dominate teams, but this is why it’s basically moron ball at this point, because everyone else has worked this out and they know we have nothing else to offer. You don’t have to physically dominate us, you have to out think us, we’ve lost 13 out of 23 games this season, lots of people out think us. Villa and City are the only teams in the top half we’ve beaten this season.
A team like Southampton, low on confidence, losing to let’s face it basically everyone. We can go there and we can dominate them because they’re so bereft of any real care at this point because they know they’re long gone. Look at the teams we have actually dominated, in the most part it’s the poorer teams, and once we’ve scored one, because they’re poor, we’ve gone on to grab a few. It’s buffed our goal difference stats well because a lot of our goals have come when we’ve scored 3 or 4 against a poor team.
It isn’t as simple as because we can’t physically dominate, it’s when we come up against managers who have actually thought about it. If you basically get your team to sit a little deeper, and just wait we will give you chances all day long. We will get high up the field and then tap it about in front of the box, defend well and eventually someone tries a wild pass which is cut out. Problem is, everyone except a CB and maybe whoever is given the death knell of playing as the 6 that day are all that stands between the other team and our keeper. One decent pass and you’re away.
You’re right, a lot of our game relies on us trying to be physically dominant. Even that though isn’t well set up, if you watch us press, we actually do it in a very disorganised way, teams play along their back line and Son, for instance, goes running after them, as the ball gets moved away from him, you then see Solanke do the same, until it moves over to Johnson who follows suit. Problem is, very often you see that they don’t press together. They press solo onto whoever has the ball, the play gets moved around and quite often teams simply play out. So our press is knackering our players out because there’s no support, it makes the opposition think quickly, but doesn’t result in them ceding possession as often as it should because our disorganised way of pressing leaves gaps to play through.
The bigger problem is that whilst this is happening in front of them, our midfield are basically told to stand high up the pitch as well. So when our disorganised press is beaten, there’s this huge green square in behind us which is why we so often see strikers with the ball in our area, and up to about 20 yards out and our nearest defender is sprinting after them from some ridiculous position.
We DO struggle against organised teams because they can see that all we have is our managers ‘principle’. There’s not a lot there to suggest they have really been coached into how to do it properly, they just do it as if they read what he’s after on a post it note so there’s no cohesion to us.
You can watch basically any of our games, numerous times you see groups of our players caught in one part of the field, numerous times you see three or four attackers running into deep, open spaces behind our defence on transitions.
A lot of our fans have been conned into thinking that we play this cavalier attacking football because there’s lots of goals in our games, we don’t, we play school playground football which originally shocked everyone for the first ten games (and even then it struggled against real quality such as Liverpool) however after those ten games the league basically said “oh… that really is it, that is literally all they do” and simply adapted. We play poorly coached, poorly thought out, poorly executed football and this is why we have lost the majority of our games. All we want to do is bully teams, and we’ve only managed it seven (seven!) times this season.
