Yep, that subject again, we struggled in a recent season when Ade and JD went off the boil and we looked round the rest of team for goals to find they weren't really there. Instead discussing who should be scoring because of their skills, fine if you want to do that, but realistically it doesn't change the fact that the players discussed then, still do not and are unlikely to score enough. This season its Soldado struggling, but its a different team now to look round for goals elsewhere. This thread came from a discussion about Paulinho, who is a decent contributor, typically 5-10, but not prolific, he needs a fair few chances to convert one. In saying that he is the type of player that could have a purple patch season where everything flies in, he's had 38 shots in the league and scored 1 so far so I don't think its this one! Getting more toward my main point here is that i noticed in the United match thread we were all quite happy with Dembele, Sandro, and Lennon, a trusty trio in every single department....except goals! Even more toward my point, lets look at team selection and forget the keeper and the back4 and concentrate on the front 6. Albeit a scorcher when he does, Sandro is one a season, and no need to say anymore on MD and AL. So the remaining 3 slots in the team at the weekend were a misfiring striker, Chadli, didn't come here with a rep or stats for goals, and Paulinho we've just discussed....the scoring was opened by fullback Kyle Walker, and we've used up Sandro's 'one'! Then there's Sig, who tbf has weighed in with a good few but although dried up late, you could say he's chipped in his bit for the first half of the season. Our goal drought has many more reasons than not enough quality service. Quality and clinical finishing is missing from a lot pf players, far too many imo. As an exercise look down a list of another teams squad and you can say right, you'll get that many from him, few more from him, same from him and so on, you run out of players very quickly looking down our list. Heading ability and natural goal scoring skills were elements missing from our squad before we signed 7 players. Lamela and Eriksen no doubt will do in the future, but to heap immediate expectation on both to produce now won't do either any good, and doesn't look like it has! Seems to have been quite a few things the team needed before and still haven't been sorted, has it even occured to the managerial dream team, or did they believe Soldado was going to shoulder the burden, thats ok if you have plan B, JD and Ade should be but are not fancied. ...what a mess!
Goals come from unexpected moves or fortinate deflections if you insist on having a plan then it must be a plan to produce more of this type of moment, surely! We have been too defensive too deliberate too ****ing organised for our own good. Dembele for me has epitomised this, there have been time when he has arrived at a point and appears to go 'Oh I not supposed to be here, alright pass it back and return to plan!' Very very frustrating indeed. I have said many times managers should be enablers but all too often they are medlers and interferers. They get in the bloody way! The simplicity of football is to employ methods to get the ball into dangerous areas and hope that you have players of sufficient quality to take advantage. We certainly have quality players, lets give them a chance to do what they're good at. I think the Paulinho/Soldado front pairing looks good and will I think produce results given a run together.
I think our problems at the moment are caused by the following: Not gambling enough going forwards: So many attacks are ended because we only have one guy in the box, often standing still waiting for a perfect delivery which more often than not does not come. Not only are our wingers not putting the ball into the box enough, but our number 10's are not joining them enough, not linking up enough or playing 1-2's. Think Gerrard and Torres, how many times in a game did Stevie G pick him out, over the top, through balls, cut backs. we get absolutely none of this at the moment (I accept Gerrard and Torres are better than CE and Soldado) This means our number 10's are in the space that our attacking midfielder should occupy (Paulinho or Dembele) waiting outside the box meaning that they are not getting involved in the attacks, and not stretching play. In my head, they should be breaking into the box in the way Lampard has been doing for years, at the end of attacks with a stretched defence looking to clean up lose balls or take a pot shot. I understand AVB's thinking of controlling the game, but what is the point of having two CB's and two Cm's stopping the oppo from attacking? The CB's are doing nothing most of the game, so why have a second CM there. Sandro is more than capable of dominating the CM and with the additional players breaking into the area the other teams will be on the back foot, as opposed to just forming lines ala Newcastle, Hull, Palace, WHAM...etc. (and that does not even take into consideration our slow build up) Also, it would be good to see either walker or rose hitting crosses when we have our number 9, 10 and attacking CM in the box, as well as both wingers lurking. Obviously this is a complete over load but when chasing a game or trying to pressurise is the kind of thing Chelsea do, and utd have done for years. For me it is the whole point of having attacking full backs, to enable you to overload in the area, otherwise they can just do what corluca used to do - do his job defensively, and let lennon get on with the attacking. I compare our movement, and link up play to Arsenal and Chelsea but it is not even close. Arsenals movement, confidence and link up play is so much better than ours that it is easy to justify the 10pts gap, especially when you see how involved Giroud is compared to Soldado and until we start using the striker to be the pinnacle of our attacks rather than an inconvenience to our sideways "possession" football we won't get anywhere.....and I assume AVB will rightly lose his job.
I am a bit more optimistic than most people on here. We have had a lot of shots and very few of them have gone in. It is only natural to therefore conclude that there is a problem with the shots. Yet I am not sure this is the case, there is always an element of luck involved too. You can't tell me that we kept on aiming at the goalkeeper etc! Then you get a team like Newcastle who at times almost seem to rely on spectacular shots going in. And some do. So then there is a "conclusion" that Newcastle must be better at shooting than us. I am confident that if we keep up the same number of shots then more will go in. We are not going to get a keeper having the best game of his career every week. Do not assume that what has happened in the first 13 matches must therefore be a pattern which will repeat over the remaining 25 (which is incidentally another two thirds of the season!) Last season the early conclusion was that we couldn't play in the last five minutes of a match - do you remember there was even tables produced which showed us near the top of the league assuming games were 85 minutes long. But it turned out not to be a valid conclusion and if anything we finished the season outperforming our rivals in the last five minutes. And please don't be naive as to think that AVB suddenly thought 'hang on, I know what the problem is, we don't play well in the last five minutes so we'll play better instead'. Things are far more complicated than that, and I am sure that a lot of things that appear to be a pattern based on fact are actually no more than chance and luck. The trouble is that with modern media, the last result or last few are discussed to death so that it's really difficult to take a longer term view. But I genuinely think the scoring problem is not as bad as it appears, and had even a few of our wayward shots gone in, fewer people would be highlighting it anyway.
I disagree in the sense that our slow, deliberate, sideways play is IMO the problem. Speculative shots from aoutside the area all add to the stats but are NOT convincing or very dangerous. It's not numbers of shots that matter it's quality of finish. United had little in the way of chances against us but they also missed very little.
To put it simply, I think we're too rigid and predictable. Hull, Palace, Swansea, Cardiff (albeit down to the keeper on that occasion) have all managed to pretty much comfortably keep our attacking play at bay, which, for a team of our standard and quality just isn't good enough.
AVB has mentioned that they altered training to accommodate this though. Basically they train for 90mins to re-enact a match, and the way to make it relevant is to apply pressure/stress training during the 85th + minute, which will make the players better at dealing with it. I don't think there is such a way to suddenly make Andros' shots like bales, though I do believe we can work on feeding our striker better. Agreed (pretty much what I said above, but without all the waffle! )
I said it elsewhere, but if the system we use is only for defensive solidity, and if we try to be more attacking we lose any form of defensive solidity, it is fundamentally flawed. We need a system that can do both, not one or the other.
Don't worry mate, it's usually me that does the babbling on. I must have said what you've written about 15 times this season already, thought I'd take a break and let someone else take the waffle mantle this time round
Interesting article, Notso. First thing we need to do is have the players playing in their preferred position where they are comfortable and will perform best. - i think that's an obvious one. Hopefully that'll improve things. The concern is that after tonight's game, we're 14 games into the season with very few goals scored and over 1/3 of the season done and dusted. We've always struggled to have a decent goal difference, and i feel that we're all ready to far into this season for it to be much better than previous seasons. I'm afraid it's going to be another season with a goal difference of about +10 at best. - And you can bet that won't be enough when the likes of City, Chelsea, Arsenal etc are likely to finish on +20 or more. The situation isn't ideal, to say the least. But we've got to start making life easy for ourselves and letting the players "express themselves". (to use the most common cliche currently used in football)
