Interesting formation, I kind of like it. Gazza, ok, hasn't played for a while, but I'm always willing to give him the benefit of a doubt. Hopefully he has improved a bit, and now has a chance to show it. It's a 3-5-2 (or 5-3-2, depends on how you look at it) with 5 very defensive players (Van Dijk, Yoshi, Fonte, Wanyama and Romeu), two attacking fullbacks to provide the width, two pacey strikers and Davis to support them and link the midfield. In my view it's a distinctly counterattacking formation. We will sit back, soak up the pressure, and try to hit them on the counter with the pace of Long and Mane. It could work. Although it bugs me a bit that Koeman's first instinct when faced with a bad run is to close down the shop. Not that it won't give results, it has worked in the past. But I'm of the opinion that you have to believe in your strengths, and in this case it means to believe that we're better than Palace when playing our game. But ok, Koeman is in this sense more reactive then proactive manager.
It's defensive quite a bit. Today we have 5 players who mostly only do the defending (3CB's and 2 DM's), while in most of the other matches we had usually only 3 players like that (2CB's and 1 DM). I would go further and add that it can hardly be more defensive than it is. Only case in which it could be more defensive if we had more defensive minded full backs. It's either a defensive formation, or there's no such a thing as a defensive formation.
Pelle and Steks are injured so the change in formation has been forced rather than a knee jerk about turn due to recent poor results!
Saints manager Ronald Koeman has been forced to ponder a few selection dilemmas. Firstly, he's without regular stopper Maarten Stekelenburg, who is being bothered by a toe injury. Top scorer Graziano Pelle (knee) is only fit enough for a spot on the bench,
But Pelle and steak are not defenders or mids. Long and Gaza have come in but he has also put in 3 CBs and 2 DMs. If we concede here I will worry.
In my experience the team that controls the match is less likely to concede. And the team that sets to defend is less likely to control the match. Not impossible though, we've done it before.
If you were worried about a weaker keeper, batton up the defence, if your target man is missing in the middle, use wings backs
No, you have missed the point. Ron has been reading all the squabbling on this board and so he picked a team so shocking that everyone would forget why they were abusing each other. The other aspect was he read on these boards that some were not impressed with Stek between the posts so he decided to put Gazza in to give those people something to chew on. Any questions?
There's a lot of pace in that line up. And no chance of Palace playing through the middle of us either.
