In terms of what Long supposedly does - Long can do well at creating space too, but the key is that he creates it in different areas for the most part I think. Long struggles coming back to the ball, we all know that, his touch is wildly inconsistent and he can't pick a pass, you only really get luck from him dropping deep if he's coming back to try and flick it on with his head, and that's an inexact science. Shane can create space by stretching defences and creating spaces in the gap between midfield and defence but we don't have players like Tadic and Mane that thrive in that space anymore, and plus in just pure distance-to-goal terms the space is in less dangerous areas. What Ings did today was create space in incredibly threatening areas and areas in which direct pacey players like Redmond and Sims thrive. And most importantly, Ings can pick a pass as he did so today.
I agreed we played pretty well, and I love the approach from Ralph to not try and mitigate Wolves' strengths, but rather attack their weaknesses and believe we can outpunch them. We may not have set out to dominate the game but God damn if that wasn't one of the most positive approaches I've seen from us in a while. And not just positive in a 'lets squeeze as many attacking players into the teamsheet with no real rhyme or reason because we haven't been able to score for **** recently' way. Positive in that we weren't afraid to allow them an inch in a belief that we could take a mile. Sure we've seen incredibly positive, pressing approaches against big teams under Ralph, but that felt almost still like pragmatism. Out-work them, limit them as best we can, and try and force mistakes or snatch something. Today we didn't care about limiting them, we just went to execute our gameplan that we believed would get us a win. And that's beautiful to see. Or I'm merely projecting it all and misreading our approach and that's just how the cards happened to fall... But **** it, we won.
