Style of play

[Shadydan]

Ok so 270 mins of turgid football now to add to a very poor run of form and similar performances for the 2nd half of last season, you still think people are knee jerking? Squad not good enough and Poch has run out of ideas.

Not gonna panic at the moment mate but yes it's concerning.

 

[Donki]

Poch is so confused right now, this second striker thing is killing us.

 

[Donki]

Today the passing was so slow. Not just the time taken to pass, but the actual passes were rolls along the grass.

I watched Liverpool arsenal the other night, oh my god that first 20 mins of the second half Liverpool were relentless. Unbelievable. We are a million miles away from that, yet we were close to that at old white hart lane.

We are no where close to Klopp football, it’s fucking me off so much.

 

[fishhhandaricecake]

We've got Kane, Eriksen, Son, Lucas, Dele, GLC, Lamela available to us.

There is no way on earth we can play the poor us card. We should be able to repeatedly carve teams like Newcastle into ribbons.

The system stinks. Not the players.

Yea fair. I remember fa cup semi vs Chelsea a few years back they bring on hazard and Costa and win the game and we had nothing on the bench, we don’t have that excuse now .

 

[fishhhandaricecake]

Not gonna panic at the moment mate but yes it's concerning.

Fair mate, wish I could be as calm about it lol, been a worrying 9 months of play in my opinion

 

[paulcumpstone]

A couple of minutes into the 2nd half I counted 8 passes for us to cross the half way line. There were 0 Newcastle players in our half, and poch wonders why the front 3 struggled to find space to create today.

 

[dagraham]

Poch is so confused right now, this second striker thing is killing us.

I don’t think he knows what our best team is. Which is concerning in itself.

 

[JCRD]

Right so anyone who thinks our style of play will be any better this season is living in dreamland. If you factor:

1 - we have lost Walker at RB and have never replaced him.
2 - Verts (our best CB) is in some stupid tiff with our manager.
3 - we have lost Dembele and only replaced him this year (2 years too late)
4 - we signed Sessegnon and he is injured.
5 - Ndombele is injured.
6 - Lo Celso was signed too late.
7 - Eriksen isn’t being played despite saving our asses against Villa.
8 - tactics are hideously wrong, from the diamond formation, to Lamela being our main attacking presence when he clearly isn’t good enough, to Son and Moura blocking Kanes positions and stifling him.
9 - Pochs continuous moaning and griping with the press and cryptic statements that drive a lot of us mad and must have an effect on the players.
10 - 15 points from our last 15 premier league games which is very real relegation form.

So given that some of these are quite easy to resolve, the question is why HAVENT we resolved them. Its so so so annoying. The problem is i just dont think Poch will change it. It really is simple, we go back to basics. We play old skool. We may not have Walker but we have KWP... play Verts... CE plays... etc

 

[Danny1]

So given that some of these are quite easy to resolve, the question is why HAVENT we resolved them. Its so so so annoying. The problem is i just dont think Poch will change it. It really is simple, we go back to basics. We play old skool. We may not have Walker but we have KWP... play Verts... CE plays... etc

Agreed. Today was the day to put Verts back in, play Eriksen from the start and really go at Newcastle. Except Poch continues to try and prove a point and continues to lose us games.

Since December 18, Poch has been a monumental failure. 15 points from 15 league games is a terrible terrible return for a supposed top manager. If this continues over the next 5-10 games then i think it’s time for him to go and it would be with my blessing.

 

[werty]

Ignoring our defensive shape which I don't want to do into at the moment, we need to go back to the 3421/3241 shape in our build up play.

*

* * * *

* *

* * *
​

Triangles everywhere. Most of the time we do it we look good, but we've abandon it the last two seasons or so and when we try something else we generally look poor. We can do it out of a plethora of "base" formations. Can obviously done with a back three with wing backs, a back four with the full backs attacking and a midfielder (Dier) dropping in, a back four with one of the full-backs tucked in and the other side attacking. Either way it's something similar to what City and Liverpool do ( the front five, anyway), exactly the shape Chelsea used when winning the league and, more importantly, we've done with great a lot of success in the past. It's a hard formation to press, gives players multiple options on the ball and puts most of our players in positions they enjoy.

Too often for the last year or two, we've ended up with something like this, whether it was a 352 or the diamond formation, and even in games like today where the base formation was 4231.

*

* * * * *

*

* * *
​

I know they look similar, but there's a couple of big things that are different. The first is we've only one man in midfield. It makes it really hard for our full-backs, or whoever is receiving the ball out wide, to play simple square passes. If the CM (usually Winks) is covered, and it's easy to cover the player, they usually have to play the ball backwards to our CB backs, or play a speculative pass into the channels. It's hard for the CM to constantly track side to side to make himself available for the ball too, and more often than not he's sat in the middle of pitch not looking for it. If you look back at the goal we conceded against United at game, you'll see Trippier has little options on the ball so tried a stupid pass, and well, you know the rest. This makes it very hard for us to play through the midfield and the distance between our build-up and attackers becomes too far.

The second thing is it completely congests our attacking players, and stops any ball being play to our strikers feet because we usually have someone from our team in the way. Having so many players forward also encourages teams to keep more back, tightened the spaces again. The opposition midfield don't need to worry about whats in front of them because, as above, we struggle to get our one CM clear to play the ball forward, so they can concentrate on limiting the ball to our narrow three behind the striker. In the top formation, with an extra man deeper, you make it easier to play through midfield and the lines. It can also draw players forward and out of position, leaving more spaces for our attackers.

 

[Donki]

I don’t think he knows what our best team is. Which is concerning in itself.

I could go a lot further than that tbh, but I won’t.

 

[dtxspurs]

2 things, like I said in the line up thread every game we play without Eriksen looks like that and has for the past 4 seasons. Horrid football. We're going to continue to play poorly so long as he isn't in the starting lineup or Lo Celso gets rolling. Lamela can't lead the charge in the creativity.

Second thing, it is of absolutely zero coincidence our worst football over the past 4 years has come with the Sissoko/Winks pairing in midfield. They are simply not good enough. The quicker we can get Dier and Ndombele playing in a double pivot the better.

 

[jonnyp]

I’m not sure we quite do to be honest mate, we could play similarly with the below but a front 3 of Kane son Lucas is no where near mane Firminiho salah and city have far far better world class creative midfielders such as : KDB, D & B. silva and we only have erisken who isn’t quite as good as them and is on his way out.

Ndombele
Lo celso
Sissoko

Lucas
Kane
Son

That’s not good enough for 4-3-3 in my opinion but we’ve never tried it so I could be wrong, it may at least be more effective than the shit we are serving up currently.

I am not saying we will do it as good as City but we don't even try to play with width or making any runs whatsoever in behind. I see lesser sides who are much better at this than us.

 

[thefierycamel]

Norwich play far better football than we do. Why can't we play like that given our squad is so much better than theirs?

 

[guy]

Norwich play far better football than we do. Why can't we play like that given our squad is so much better than theirs?

Tactics

 

[Hakkz]

Another issue I'm starting to have is that I get the feeling Poch has Sissoko as one of the first names on the team sheet and tries to fit him in to a formation based on that. I don't think Sissoko should be on the pitch unless he's in the middle of the park doing what he did last season. If Poch is trying new stuff, don't shoehorn Sissoko into the team by putting him on the right wing or whatever.

 

[jezz]

Poch needs to learn quick.
Every team outside the the top 6 will do exactly what Newcastle and Villa did.
We don't need Sissoko or Winks when these type of teams turn up and stick 10 behind the ball.
Eriksen or GLC could have started the game in midfield.

 

[THOWIG]

It looks like we have no identity as a team. We look so slow and ponderous.

 

[ajspurs]

I know many will disagree but just thinking about, do you know what's really funny? And this is coming from someone who sighed every time he came on, who felt down when I read he may be coming back and even though he made some great contributions last season which I'll never forget, I just didn't like what we turned into when he was on the pitch. In saying all that, I would have put Llorente in that team yesterday in a heartbeat. Lofting the ball to him and feeding off knockdowns would have been better than what I saw yesterday.

 

[Hakkz]

I know many will disagree but just thinking about, do you know what's really funny? And this is coming from someone who sighed every time he came on, who felt down when I read he may be coming back and even though he made some great contributions last season which I'll never forget, I just didn't like what we turned into when he was on the pitch. In saying all that, I would have put Llorente in that team yesterday in a heartbeat. Lofting the ball to him and feeding off knockdowns would have been better than what I saw yesterday.

Still think we could have gone for Rondon as that option. He really knew how to hassle defenders, which opens up space for others.