WHAT!!! Me WRONG??????? WTF!! How DARE you!!
Seriously, lads, I still think we don't do it anything like as much as we used to - particularly when we move forward in midfield. We have, understandably for the moment lost some fluency there. I made the comment after the Stuttgart (granted, a high quality team) game when we played very few compared to our usual game.
Thing is, look at yesterday. The first half, despite our goals, was abysmal in terms of our passing, a point I made on the match thread. Triangles are played by players in reasonably close proximity and we rarely did that first half. Passes were being intercepted or misdirected because they were being played OVER DISTANCE - few triangles and not a lot of our usual movement to support the man in possession. In rugby terms, the man on the ball was often isolated.
The second half, when we got our act together, was literally a different ball game. West Ham had fallen off the pace and were going for damage limitation - their body language said it all. We were allowed the time and space to dwell on the ball so we reverted to type and stroked the ball around in accomplished style. We can kill any team doing that. Now, my point is, can we play these triangles when the other team is more organised and going hard at us and pressing tight for the full 90?
It is safe to say that none of the top teams will allow us the freedom we got in that second half and you can add the likes of Everton and a few others to that. West Ham were not good enough to contain us but we all know that there are far sterner tests in front of us. Laudrup knows this because he emphasised it in his post match comments - enjoy the moment but don't get carried away, was the message. And he conceded that we might have been a little fortunate to go in with a two goal half time lead. He certainly knew we could play better and commented that our passing had been ragged. We put it right with a vengeance, though, and it was brilliant to watch.
The thing is, I do recognise that we won't be playing as many triangles now because ML wants us to look for the killer pass sooner, to be more penetrative. Amen to that. We were all crying out for it last season. So, was I wrong? I still believe that my comments were justified at the time but I also believe that Laudrup will reincarnate our triangles and integrate them with far more positive effect into his game plan. Finally, I always respect the views of most of my fellow posters and have no problems with differing views.
don't know who posted about losing our triangles when playing, but if you watch the sequence after the highlights you will see that we have not abandoned it at all. And in fact I would say that we've added an end product to our game.
Easy to see what he was getting at even though I thought at the time he was wrong. The thread was something like "Goodbye triangles, goodbye possession"? Something like that. Ivor is one of the best posters we've got but he was wrong on that one imo.
City is a a an unanswerable conundrum