It's too complicated

[SwissBlade]

More of a question, but having banged on for a while about people like JCR, I'm wondering what others think

Are we trying to make things too complicated on the pitch? Is Adkins trying to tactically outwit opponents by setting us up with too much to think about.

Bergen Blade will hopefully relish this possibility to analyse and answer this one. Do you think we mess around trying to over play, take too many touches or out pass our opposition?

I've not seen any footage from Tuesday so I'd be interested to know how we attacked, how the goals were scored and how our defending was? Could we benefit from simplifying things?

 

[Blade56]

JCR is the most frustrating player, he appears to make it complicated. When he gets the ball on the wing the game is irrelevant it becomes the JCR show, don't know what's in his head...
Wait for him to come to me and play get it off me if you can....
Missed me, I'll go back and let him have another go, haha missed me again
Now do the double dummy, step over and turn back that'll look good....
Ow its on the wrong foot turn again.......
Haha won a throw in!

JCR just run, turn, cross, it's not your X-factor or JCR's got talent moment and it's not your problem if we forgot to have men in the area.

As for Tuesday Swizzler same old over complicated play in the first half and we gave every player 5/6 metres unmarked space but got to say the passing and interchanges up the pitch for the first goal was breathtaking by our standards. Every time we got the ball we had a player tight on us to make us make mistakes. Second half was a over reaction with triple sub and hoof ball tactics, was it effective? They scored again then sat deep the rest of the game and let us come at them, lots of corners but for all the effort it resulted in one goal.

 

[s10blade]

We need to go much more direct generally I'd say. Not to be mistaken with a hoof that is but every time we attack it has to left to right to left to right, all thier players get back and then more left to right and then a punt from 25 yards. Why not just shoot in the first place? I thought we would have got past this by now

A few more direct passes into the box (dare I say it!) may result in us scoring a few of the type we concede - soft, scrambled in, deflected which we don't do any more. Let's face it, generally the opposition defence and GK are crap and we don't take anywhere enough risks.

We really are our own worst enemy.

 

[curtisblades]

There was a few periods of the game on Tuesday that I counted the number of touches it took both sets of players to pass the ball.
Blades players, most notably Che Adams, Keiron Freeman and Chris Basham, took 6 or 7 or 7 touches to move the ball on. Shrewsbury on the other hand moved the ball quickly up the pitch and were direct with their passing. By taking too many touches, our players are running down blind alleys or into trouble. We need to pass and move the ball quickly and effectively in all thirds of the pitch to do well in this cess pit of a league.

 

[Esablade]

Good post.
It's been apparent all season.

The oppo's 'lesser players' move the ball quickly, 1,2,3 short passes at most then forwards down a channel usually. Southend tore us apart first half doing just that..
It's 'old fashioned triangles' but works well against our sloths...making any oppo that can run faster than 'Brian the snail' look world-beaters!

We have few options going forward because of the teams generally immobility...the only outlet is JCR when he plays...so we resort to backwards/sideways or an attempt at a cross-field worldie-pass...which often fails.

We still seem to be relying on a moment of magic from individuals, Baxter/Che or JCR to create owt...( as under Clough with Murphy)

 

[Billyblade]

I can understand the desire to play a slick passing game and I think the majority of us would prefer to see that brand of football.
Unfortunately, to do this you either have to have world class passers of the ball like Messi, Ronaldo or in his day Beckham. Or you have to create space to give the fella on the ball an easy option pass. Pass and move, pass and move.
If no-one is in space then the player on the ball panics because in all fairness he's not Messi, Ronaldo etc. and cannot pick passes out like them. His options are then to pass the ball to someone who is marked, pass backwards or lump it. All 3 of those scenarios are happening at the minute and causing us to lose possession too readily. This is because we have players who are not confident on the ball and everyone is so static when we're in possession they're not creating space. Opposition teams have scouted this and know that if they get in our face from minute one we are clueless.
Personally, I think the answer would be to improve the fitness of the match day squad so that movement is paramount. If you give the player easy pass options then we are less likely to lose possession.
We can't really exercise the lump it option because we don't have the personnel up top to do anything with it. When it does get pinged up there it comes straight back.
Another problem is we are getting bullied too much. We need some "ugly" players to make sure we don't get out-muscled.

 

[Smirth]

Most players, except Baxter, hold on to the ball for far too long and let players get back in position. As soon as Baxter gets the ball he's straight away looking who to pass to or what to do with the ball, he often tries first time passes as well which granted some don't come off but he's the only one trying to up the tempo it seems.

 

[Tyler Durden]

I want ugly, route one, long-ball football back. I don't give a shit how it looks. It's no more painful than watching umpteen sideways/backwards passes with no end result.

 

[SwissBlade]

Most players, except Baxter, hold on to the ball for far too long and let players get back in position. As soon as Baxter gets the ball he's straight away looking who to pass to or what to do with the ball, he often tries first time passes as well which granted some don't come off but he's the only one trying to up the tempo it seems.

A lot of the time his passes look shit as he puts the ball where the player should be instead of where they are.

He's one who'd benefit from better players around him because of this. He also seems to link well with Billy and Che

 

[BushBlade]

I want ugly, route one, long-ball football back. I don't give a shit how it looks. It's no more painful than watching umpteen sideways/backwards passes with no end result.

Why? It can no more effective than this shit.
Whatever style of play, tactics, formations a manager deploys, it looks shit when it's not working.
I don't care whether it's long ball, possession based, counter attacking, whatever providing it's done properly.
And we have virtually no players at present who could play long ball successfully. There's no point telling Coutts to get up and down the pitch or telling Reed to get in their faces and rough em up a bit. We don't even have a target man, both Sammon and Higdon are both pretty soft for big blokes and not all that in the air.
Think of Harry's team at its best; well organised defence playing an offside trap, energetic physical midfielders working their bollocks off, Deano, fucking Deano - a nightmare to defend against, players who would just run for the team, players who could cross a ball, a great keeper.

Then look at ours now.....

 

[Tyler Durden]

Why? It can no more effective than this shit.
Whatever style of play, tactics, formations a manager deploys, it looks shit when it's not working.
I don't care whether it's long ball, possession based, counter attacking, whatever providing it's done properly.
And we have virtually no players at present who could play long ball successfully. There's no point telling Coutts to get up and down the pitch or telling Reed to get in their faces and rough em up a bit. We don't even have a target man, both Sammon and Higdon are both pretty soft for big blokes and not all that in the air.
Think of Harry's team at its best; well organised defence playing an offside trap, energetic physical midfielders working their bollocks off, Deano, fucking Deano - a nightmare to defend against, players who would just run for the team, players who could cross a ball, a great keeper.

Then look at ours now.....

I take your point about not having the players to make long-ball work. That style of play involves chasing the high ball and lets face it, these wankers won't run for anything unless there's a roulette table or a line of coke at the end of it.
But what annoyed me equally under Blackwell and to an extent Warnock was the tendency for supporters to demand flowing, attractive football from players who couldn't string two passes together. The problem we have now is a team who can't/won't make either approach work.

 

[BushBlade]

I take your point about not having the players to make long-ball work. That style of play involves chasing the high ball and lets face it, these wankers won't run for anything unless there's a roulette table or a line of coke at the end of it.
But what annoyed me equally under Blackwell and to an extent Warnock was the tendency for supporters to demand flowing, attractive football from players who couldn't string two passes together. The problem we have now is a team who can't/won't make either approach work.

Agree 100%. I said at the time, on the other forum, that 'attractive football' isn't attractive when it's not done right and it's just as frustrating watching passing football going wrong as it is watching Quinny kick the ball over his shoulder in the vain hope someone might get on the end of it.

 

[Bladesman]

 

[Jonboy60]

I would suggest it's impossible to have a squad of players, where not one of them can move a ball around quicker. It's got to be down to tactics, what tactics they are I do not know. Is it because no one makes themselves available, are there no runners, what sort of training do they do in the week, Whereby come saturday they've forgotten everything.

 

[Alfreton14Blade]

I suppose we may as well go direct, on the basis that we drew the second half on Tuesday playing the ugliest brand of hoofball imaginable (& that on the basis of persistently hoiking the ball up to preposterous heights, hoping that a centre forward who's about as useful in the air as an ostrich or a penguin would get on the end of it). It got better results than the attempts at football we've been trying so far this season.

But, we'd be bucking the trend when the 23 other clubs in the division all try & play proper football these days, even minnows like Colchester, Shrewsbury & Crewe.

 

[Patrick Suffaux]

More of a question, but having banged on for a while about people like JCR, I'm wondering what others think

Are we trying to make things too complicated on the pitch? Is Adkins trying to tactically outwit opponents by setting us up with too much to think about.

Bergen Blade will hopefully relish this possibility to analyse and answer this one. Do you think we mess around trying to over play, take too many touches or out pass our opposition?

I've not seen any footage from Tuesday so I'd be interested to know how we attacked, how the goals were scored and how our defending was? Could we benefit from simplifying things?

I think we have a lot of issues complicating things for us Swiss. We have a handful of decent players and the rest are rubbish and lack the character to play for a club with such high expectation, that's the biggest problem.

I think several players were playing above themselves early in the season and probably gave Adkins the impression that they were good enough to play a certain way and he's tried to see that through. This has ultimately multiplied our problems but to be honest I don't think he's asking them to do anything particularly innovative or complicated. His playing style has always been very straight forward and effective but perhaps he had the quality of players in the past.

My conclusion is that we have a poor team and that he doesn't know what to do with them anymore. Furthermore I think he doesn't know what to do because he has nothing to change it with. He's a bit stuck and I think most would be.

 

[Bergen Blade]

More of a question, but having banged on for a while about people like JCR, I'm wondering what others think

Are we trying to make things too complicated on the pitch? Is Adkins trying to tactically outwit opponents by setting us up with too much to think about.

Bergen Blade will hopefully relish this possibility to analyse and answer this one. Do you think we mess around trying to over play, take too many touches or out pass our opposition?

I've not seen any footage from Tuesday so I'd be interested to know how we attacked, how the goals were scored and how our defending was? Could we benefit from simplifying things?

I think we've lacked energy, tempo and movement and think it's due to our midfield being too weak/poorly balanced. I also agree that we play it sideways and backwards too much. Sometimes that's needed, but if managers put too much emphasis on possession, number of passes and dominating the game the players may do too much of that and fail to identify great chances to break and punish the opposition when they're vulnerable. We've also had too few players who are able to make us play a high tempo, energetic type of football.

Adkins has wanted to play 4-4-2, but he's failed to find a good enough mix in midfield. By the sounds of it he's changed the system today and played with more tempo. I'm personally sceptical about a midfield containing both Hammond and Coutts, but will have a closer look at how they did when the full match video is up on BP.

 

[judge]

I think our players are wankers