More Striker = More Goal

[LondonBlade89]

Couldn’t agree more. Like CaptainMorgans I was all over Buendia. But ignoring him for a second, I couldn’t work out why our early interest in Swift - which I took to mean a clear desire to upgrade RCM with a ball carrying, more creative player - ended in absolutely nothing. Reading may have screwed us around but for me there’s no reason why we couldn’t look into another player there, be it Buendia or someone like Conor Gallagher, another who I thought was a miss.

More generally, as classy as Berge has been, I think we misjudged him from a team building perspective. I’m still not sure he’ll ever be our central midfielder in this system. And what was our plan on set pieces with Norwood out of the team anyway? And that’s without even getting into fully agreeing with you that I don’t think it was up front where we needed to chuck loads of money. Returns look poor so fair.

 

[Chabuddy G]

Couldn’t agree more. Like CaptainMorgans I was all over Buendia. But ignoring him for a second, I couldn’t work out why our early interest in Swift - which I took to mean a clear desire to upgrade RCM with a ball carrying, more creative player - ended in absolutely nothing. Reading may have screwed us around but for me there’s no reason why we couldn’t look into another player there, be it Buendia or someone like Conor Gallagher, another who I thought was a miss.

More generally, as classy as Berge has been, I think we misjudged him from a team building perspective. I’m still not sure he’ll ever be our central midfielder in this system. And what was our plan on set pieces with Norwood out of the team anyway? And that’s without even getting into fully agreeing with you that I don’t think it was up front where we needed to chuck loads of money. Returns look poor so fair.

I’m not saying for one minute Brewster is a bad player or even a bad signing, but he wasn’t what we needed. What we needed was glaring, a LCB and some CREATIVITY. Wilder blind to it.

 

[Chabuddy G]

I was very much "team Buendia." Thought it was more important to get service up to the strikers we had than to improve the strikers. However, the movement of our lads at the top of the pitch - Brewster in particular, has been diabolical. 5 touches?

You could have Filipo Inzaghi upfront for us and he wouldn’t score. The players we have just aren’t capable of spotting runs or intricate movements in the system we play. It’s poor.

 

[CaptainMorgans]

I really do think it's time to drop one of the strikers, play with a midfield 4 and try to wrestle back control of games. At the moment we're wasting a shirt having two strikers.

Let's see Norwood & Berge together in the middle. Give Berge the license to drive from deep, with Norwood dictating the tempo of games from the base with long raking passes to our wide men (Bogle, Lundstram, Fleck, Osborn).

The problem is who do you play up front on their own? I guess the answer has to be McBurnie, Burke or Mousset. It might not sound ideal, but we'd be relying on our midfield 4 attacking the box a lot more but also moving up the pitch together and holding onto possession. We need to encourage them to pass and then make runs beyond the receiver. At the moment the flat 3 are all miles apart and terrified of making an error because their badly exposed if they give it away.

There was a period of play before the end of the first half which demonstrated how poor we have become in possession. I think we strung together about 20 passes to a man in space. All sideways and backwards. Chelsea were almost laughing at our lack of ideas. It went all the way back to Ramsdale who hoofed it up field and possession was lost. This needs to stop.

I guess the conclusion that can be drawn is that

"More striker = no more goal"