- Sep 28, 2004
- 45,893
- 68,893
6 points dropped this season now to teams that have defended deep and hit us on the counter. We are weak against pace and teams that play counter-attacking football. It's our Achilles' Heel.
The high line works if we can keep our concentration defensively but it's clear to any manager of weaker teams, or even teams as good as ours, that the way to beat us is to sit back, defend deep and centrally (particularly if we offer zero width on the left) and then look to hit us on the break.
Arsenal should have beaten us by 3 or more using that tactic (Lloris saved us from embarrassment) and today, West Ham did the same except they also played for set pieces and corners when in our half of the pitch. I wasn't surprised to see Walcott tear our high line apart at the Emirates, and West Ham played exactly as I would have predicted today.
AVB now needs to get a plan B if that's what the opposition plan to do because we're now going to see a lot more teams set up to beat us like West Ham did today. Start with Sandro/Capoue in the middle and keep one destroyer sitting back and distributing from deep, in order to break up the counter, and use some bloody width on the left hand side. You're not going to break through a body of ten men if they're all congested in the middle, particularly if there's not enough movement off the ball.
And conversely we are the slowest team on the counter-attack in the prem.
It's painful watching us try and build something on the break, it really is.