Ok, i couldn’t watch the game last night. But regardless a a bit sceptical of this article, which seems to be claiming that only yesterday ETH finally hit the jackpot with his strategy.
My one question is what, after a year and a half in, changed yesterday?
And no I’m not calling for ETH to go, and I will be patient with him, not because he has some grand strategy but simple because we haven’t a choice and our priority is for the Glazers to go.
But really, what changed?
well I think the article is rather clear.
Usually the way we press is that one of the wingers has two players to take care of, so for example last season if they played towards rashford, he would press their LB, our striker would press their LCB and then Antony would be between their RCB and RB, this means that we press 4 players with 3 giving us either a man advantage in the midfield or the backline, now the obvious weakness of this is that if they manage to play it over to the RB then he has plenty of space to run into, because by design our fullbacks would sit back deeper.
Now as the article says this time our fullbacks pushed up higher making it a true-man-to man press, which can of course be more dangerous if it starts to fall apart but can also be really strong.
Another change was to switch back from single pivot to double pivot with bruno in front of them, giving more passing options for the backline, so it’s less disconnected.
and then the most obvious change was finally seemingly finding a settled back 4 with Dalot, Evans, Maguire, AWB. There was a stat on Re****t that Ten hag has had 11 different starting back 4 combinations in 16 games. That’s not good, hard to build from that.
If you remember like 2 seasons ago when Liverpool had a massive injury crisis at the back they struggled too, hard, like lost 6 in a row at home.
My one question is what, after a year and a half in, changed yesterday?
THe article focuses on this season btw, because we started with a different strategy than last season and that season can be split up into like 3 distinct phases too.
We have a big test against Luton Town this weekend.