Are we actually playing the same system though? We’re playing the same formation but that’s not the same as playing the same system. I’m struggling to watch at the moment, it’s on TV but I lose attention quite quickly and only half watch it but it seems to me there have been a few changes.
We seem to be more rigid about playing out from the back. Under Wilder, when our defence was pressed, we’d go long to try to push the opposition’s back line deeper so they couldn’t press as high and then, when we’d force them back, we’d start passing it around and playing out from the back.
Overlapping centre halves. Do we really do that these days? I’d like to see heat maps for Bash and Bryan and compare with Bash and JOC from a year or so ago.
Effective pressing from the front. We don’t seem to be able to press as a team anymore. Our presses are naive, we don’t seem to know how to “set traps” anymore. Instead of two or three pressing together to try to force the player in possession into playing a ball to a poorly positioned opponent or force them backwards, we have one or two run towards the man with the ball and he just beats it and takes two players out of the game.
We seem to have abandoned the things that made us effective, along with urgency and aggression. We were losing all of this under Wilder but it seems to have been accelerated since he left. Our tactics don’t seem to take into account what the opponents are going to do. It’s very much like I’d expect a development side to play like, where the emphasis is teaching kids to play ‘properly’ rather than first and foremost trying to win the game.
At our best under Wilder, we made the opposition look crap, we stopped them playing their game, then tried to impose our game. Now we make every team we play look like Man City.
