momo88 said:
I agree with the first bit - people get far too hung up on the idea that you have to play with 3/5 in midfield any time you come up against a decent side. If Silva and Nasri play quite narrow, we often end up with four players in fairly central areas anyway. It does need the two strikers to press well, though.
That's also not to say that there aren't occasions where it might be advisable to play like that, e.g. against an obviously superior passing side like Bayern. Whether a match away at Arsenal falls into that category, I'm not sure.
I suppose it's perhaps inevitable that every time we lose a game while playing two up front, people will turn around and accuse Pellegrini of getting his tactics wrong/being tactically naive etc (often when it has more to do with individual players simply being well off the mark in terms of their performance). Yet I've seldom heard anyone say that we won a match precisely because we played two strikers, something which modern defences simply aren't that used to coping with, and which played a huge role in us twatting Utd, Arsenal, Spurs etc. last season.