Yup, that's the conundrum. We have the players to pressure up the pitch, we have the players to play a one touch passing game, in fact our passing and movement's been as good as any prem team at times this season; but do we have the players to take advantage of half a yard of space and punish defenders every time? those are the rarest players in football. Doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to try and play like Bayern or Barca though, even though we don't have those players.
Welp, I'll bring this up again. Direct 4-4-2 continues to **** us - do we change our shape for these games?
Shaw and Chambers didn't quite offer enough threat down the wing against their wide midfielders. And we couldn't break down the defensive spine. I don't think it's necessarily the formation but the style of play. Teams can sit back and beat us on the counter. The games where teams play defense and battle hard at midfield I expect us to have to settle for 1-0 wins. But we're too often giving up 2 or more goals to those teams. I get what you are saying in terms of tactics, but I don't think we have the players right now. When Lovren is healthy and if we get another CB then we will be much more solid at the back and that's going to give us more options.
What makes me worry is teams will watch that display and say "ah, that's what we need to do!". Will we change when we start to get shredded? No.
Not really going to work like that. Football is a funny game. Arsenal battered Sunderland, who beat us, but we drew with Arsenal. Every 90 minutes is different, even if it was the same two teams playing each other every week.
Teams no doubt set themselves up to play us (which is a compliment), but in most games we could still have won if we had better finishing. I would be more worried if we had virtually no chances in game after game. But that isn't the case...we could have won/drawn yesterday...we have to improve our finishing. This is like a stuck record...the trouble is that poor finishing costs us in the PL whereas it limited us to narrow wins in the Championship instead of thrashing someone.
