4-5-1 is the way it's all going, well 4-2-3-1 which is a variant of 4-5-1. I'd guess all the top clubs in the world play pointless football and send the points gift wrapped? I'm also in complete agreement that Bayern, Dortmund, Chelsea, Barca, (both) Madrid, Man U, arsenal, the list goes on and on, are complete losers, tossers and people who hate football.
I take it you hate most of the Premier League then? Cos it is undoubtedly the most common formation. Despite - as you correctly say - the media constantly trying to dress it up as 4-3-3.
i only watch the pl when city are in it. most of it is uninteresting. i've no interest in foreign games either. it's no use quoting teams that win things no matter what formation they play. they have expensive exceptional players and are very much the exception to the rule. your boltons, your wigans, your other pl also-rans don't have and will never have the players to make it work. they'd be far better off sticking to something more traditional and adventurous (almost anything would be more adventurous), like we did against arsenal, liverpool, man utd in our first few pl games. look what happened when we changed to 4-5-1. the points evaporated. the problem with many mediocre pl teams is that they play man utd as if they're already given up on the idea of getting any points. teams should be going for the jugular against man utd, not just parking the bus. as corporal jones says, they don't like it up 'em.
This is true. Hardly anyone has the confidence in a four-man midfield any more so it's all 4-5-1 or 4-2-3-1. I can see x's point though. Some teams playing 4-5-1 can be really negative. Under PB we looked miles better whenever we played 4-4-2. However under Barmby the 4-2-3-1 one was good so it depends really. You need to have some good attacking players for it to work.
That's pretty much because we didn't play Garcia as a lone striker in a 442. How he thought putting the best wide creator of goals in an unfamiliar role was going to work I don't know. It reduced the chances created and put a worse striker on the end of the ones that were left in one move.
The thing about any formation is the way you play it. You can be in a 4-5-1 with very attack minded wingers like aluko and Brady, an attacking midfielder like koren and still be very attacking. The problem with our 4-5-1 iOS we set out to be negative with George, marney and Kevin kilbane with ***an and Garcia on the wings and hessle road up front. Their was no pace anywhere in midfield or attack and all we did was set up to boot long balls to hessle road all game who was utterly hopeless in the air and slower than a peddle oat trying to get upstream in white water rapids. I've no problem with 4-5-1 so long as its designed with pace, flair and intent and not built to stick 10 men behind the balls and catapult balls to proschwitz' head.
NP tried that too so there was obviously some good reason, and bearing in mind the players we had available at that point under NP, he made it work pretty well. The thing that annoyed me in the 2nd PL season was that Altidore and JVoH never got more than a couple of games together even though every time they did play together they looked really good.
Not strictly true, they did play quite a bit, but altidore mysteriously seemed to play on the left ****ing wing half the time.
I honestly don't know what he's gonna do at united. I think he's incredibly overrated. Not the right ethic and attitude either. He's aston villa level, no united imo.
They never really got a run though, PB was constantly tinkering with the team that season. I remember there were games like Wolves at home when we played well but conceded two **** goals and managed to draw 2-2 so what he did was drop both strikers next game and revert to 4-5-1. It just seemed like the response to every bad result was to drop the strikers who were playing well and stick with the same ****e defence every week.
Zayatte and Gardner were not a **** defence. I was furious when blockhead got rid of them both, ****ing idiot ****.
Replacing Gardner with Gerrard was the best transfer deadline day activity I can ever remember us doing. Especially considering it was a like for like replacement and actually saved us money.
I remember it a bit differently, it wasn't in response to bad performances/results he changed the team, it seemed to be completely random. That was what was really annoying about it, we'd play well in the 442 one week and then for no reason what so ever be playing 451 the next, get comfortably beaten, and yet we'd stick with it for a couple of games before going back to 442. You'd get your hopes up thinking he'd realised because he stuck with that for a couple of games only for him to change it again for no apparent reason. After the 2-2 with Wolves though there's no way we dropped both strikers and switched to 451. It was the week the Wayne Bridge and John Terry situation came out and we had 3 home games in 8 days. It's memorable because after Wolves we played Chelsea and then Man City and were unbeaten (1-1 and 2-1). Altidore was really getting at Terry (as were the fans for that matter), so he can't have been dropped. Then the Man City game we won, and that's always one of the games I use to say that 442 was a better formation for us because it shows the stats weren't skewed by us playing 442 against crap teams and 451 against better teams (Pompey at home being one that shows 451 failing even against crap teams). It was also the week when Cairney looked a a really good PL midfielder even though he was up against some of the best (Chelsea) and toughest (De Jong and Vieira) midfielders around.
All of that is correct. The Wolves game was just an example of a game where the front two played well. JVoH's goal in that game was a beautiful finish.
