No, quite clearly you're the one being extremely naive. Look. Two teams go into halftime. You're telling me only one team ever thinks about second half tactics? Or that it isn't possible to say, play more defensively the first 20 minutes and then press later in the game? Of course stuff happens that you can't control. As a manager your job is to prevent that from happening as much as possible and to regain control as quickly as you can. I never said all things are equal. They usually aren't, and sometimes that is because one manager is better than the other. That manager being the one who makes better adjustments as the game goes on. Your managerial plan seems to take the same approach as your posts-- that everyone is a complete idiot and it simply takes a clever man such as yourself to fix it. It can't possibly be that other people know the same things you do and that there might be more than one solution. Nope. It's completely clear and ohsosimple-- and yet somehow no one else has thought of it. Go ahead. Why don't you just instruct Lambert that he needs to "take his chances." Obviously, he wasn't trying to score at all. He was just going to play aimless headers until you pointed out to him that he should instead try to direct them past the goalkeeper. He's never thought of that before. Brilliant! oh wait. Turns out Lambert HAS thought of it, he just couldn't execute. Well, that's too bad because now the team is out of ideas. Game over, it's all downhill from here. Say maybe an enterprising team could hire someone who has like, additional ideas for when situations like that occur. I wonder what you'd call that position?
Oh dear, you did take offence at my post. I won't carry on anymore with this as you clearly don't want to dicsuss it without getting aggressive. Never mind. I'll move on. Could have been a good debate.
Do we think a manager should be able to second guess an opponents tactical changes at half time? This is a general question to anyone. If a team has the vast majority of the game in the 1st half should they adjust their tactics in the anticipation that the other side will?
You don't. I've probably not read up the thread enough on this question, but I assumed it was about timing of substitutions..? One can react, that is make substitutions shortly after the 2nd half starts, to counter the opposition's changes, once they've become apparent, or one can be pro-active and make the changes first in an effort to boss the match.
Well the specific scenario we're talking about is when you are winning at half time and your opponent is presumably going to make tactical changes (not necessarily make subs, but perhaps change shape). My opinion of this is that you don't need to be pro-active; your opponent does. You are in the position of being able to just wait and see what your opponent changes and act accordingly if necessary. You may not need to change anything. You are winning, after all, and your tactics are presumably good already.
Yeah, fair enough. Don't change something if it ain't broke. Some managers would still try to tweak things, even in your scenario, at HT. It's all fluid. As Qwerty alludes to, it would a lot simpler if it wasn't for that damned opposition out there.
I thought the scenario being discussed was when a team has dominated the first half, failed to score and gone in at 0-0? We have a clear plan which tends to be very effective early in games and less so when and if teams wise up and change their approach. I would have thought it would be a good idea for the manager to put himself in the shoes of his opposite number, consider what changes the opposition might make and how we should respond if those changes are made.
OK, I get it. Yes, your posts resemble mine in length. I think we get slightly carried away at times. I know I do. I think I must enjoy typing or something.
Well, it doesn't have to be a chess game kind of deal where you anticipate the exact opposition move and then make an exact response with a formal tactical switch with a sub or changing roles at halftime. But if there exists a general pattern where over the course of several matches where you tend to dominate the first half and then find you are less ineffective in the second half then there may a common theme. If for example, you find that teams start playing longball in the second half then you can practice playing defense against longballs and tell the team to anticipate this change in play for the next game. Maybe Lallana tends to be gassed by 65 minutes so you can decide that instead of pressing all the way through the first half, you'll take a 5 minute break at some point. Our squad depth is an issue, but we're stuck with it. And it will probably be some years before we have a Willian and Oscar on our bench as options. Similarly, we probably won't be getting Luis Suarez next year, so we have to live with the fact that we won't always finish our chances and score as efficiently as we'd like. So perhaps there is some kind of tactical solution/game plan that will allow us to create more and better chances in the second half instead of settling for draws or freak losses when we don't score in our usual 20-35 minutes of first half domination.
