Thing is... We've got 4 who are either capable or have it as their "natural" position (I.e on Fifa!) but they're Cattermole, Kirchhoff, Rodwell and Denayer. 3 quarters of them play a combined total of 40 games a season and the other is a man city player!!
A lot of people misconceived our formation and seem to think "Defoe and Anichebe up top is 4-4-2" for some reason. Anichebe and Defoe linked very well but no way was that 4-4-2
Agree it would be a massive backward step - I honestly have a feeling Liverpool may be our "darkones" - 6 pts
It's dead easy, you start off with a diamond formation, then as the game goes on you alter it to a triangular formation, then revert to three five two. In the end it is still eleven v eleven and depending on the close ness of the game you either defend for your life, a just sling the ball forward and hit and hope. Hope this helps.
Took me most of the match to conceive our formation, in the first half we had at least four different players playing left midfield and quite often nobody.
We interchange as most teams do. The last two matches Watmore has had 10 minutes as striker. Vic scored his goals when he had swapped to the right. It makes it a pain in the arse to mark and part the reason zonal marking is so back in fashion. The big thing now is to make sure the back line is your only line as the modern day footballer is so effective at exploiting the gaps between straight lines. It makes formations hard to work out especially the further to ground level you're viewing it from cause they're so staggered and constantly interchanging. They're just not structured like they are on paper really are they. You see our formation much clearer when we drop really deep. We just didn't need to do that very often against an equally poor side.
It was concerning to me because of the amount of times that there was nobody there at all, I could see the players pointing at each other to say you're over there now but the communication was lacking. No need to bugger about so much in my opinion. Anichebe had the best of their young LB so let him crack on there and stop trying to be too clever and create huge gaps in your own midfield in the meantime.
Thing is though, he started the game on the left up against a rb, so it's the buggering about that had him on the right for the goals. Everyone is doing it for a reason mate. We've just done it and it helped win us a game. Staying rigid and predictable is just giving defenders time to get the measure of you, sometimes the swap is to see if a player can get more joy up against a different player. Tactics init. The Peter Reid days of never changing a thing ever are well and truly gone.
Aye but there's a difference between never changing and changing every five or ten minutes like we did against Hull, a better side would have taken advantage of us down our left and we were lucky Hull didn't. I thought we looked better when Anichebe stayed on the right personally, not saying he should always play there regardless of what's happening on the pitch. It was just infuriating to see Hull attacking down their right, our midfield are all waiting for each other to do something about it and PVA is left on his own. They play like strangers at the best of times so I fear this kind of complexity is too much for them at the present.
I would say that when the position swapping and covering worked then it worked well and should help to conserve stamina if they're not busting a gut to get back because someone else has dropped in. I noticed PVA jogging back several times when we were in danger and my interpretation was that they've been told to take it easy in terms of burning energy and to cover for each other which works great as long as the players can hack it.
