thenabster said:
teddykgb said:
React how? He's already playing people out of position there. Should he have birthed a fast, PL level CB this week and raised it quickly?
I just don't see what you expected.
Boyata could have played and Garcia or Barry should have played in the midfield with Yaya and Fernandinho. Why don't we play with a holding midfielder away from home. We have two midifielders who don't like to defend and everytime we lose the ball the whole team is on the backheel because nobody in the midifeld wants to defend. Look at the slalom Kim had for the first goal, no one came to close him down.
That's how an adept manager reacts to a situation. Plus why are we ostracizing Barry? When things are going well nobody cares but if things get bad, that shit will come to hunt MP like Anelka did for AVB.
So we lose because of shambolic defending and an inability to penetrate the bus and your tactical suggestion is to deploy a
holding midfielder ?
Yaya and Fernandinho both "like" to defend. We did not lose today because we were caught on the counter and didn't have a deep midfielder to break up play. Not one of our goals were due to this "tactical error". We had the majority of the ball and Fernandinho and Yaya both won the ball back at an acceptable rate.
Again, not one goal was scored because of anything a holding midfielder would have done. Yaya didn't track his runner for the first goal, a mistake Barry has made several times recently as well. Nonetheless, they were deep and setup, there's nothing a holding mid would ahve done there, excepting maybe a different person might have put in the effort to track his man, which is a player issue, not a tactical one. The team was in position to defend, they simply didn't defend. I'm not sure how a holding midfielder helps us not concede from corners, but if you can prove that one, i'm all ears. Again, the team didn't execute, they were not beaten tactically.
As far as Boyata, if that's the "answer" then the question is quite obviously the problem. Choosing between Boyata and Garcia is like choosing between cancer and AIDS (just a joke). Boyata would never have been inserted over Lescott, and although Garcia was incredibly shaky, he managed to not be at fault for any of their goals.
To summarize, if we had been tactically annhilated, we wouldn't have dominated possession, chances, etc. Or if we had, the other team would have broken well and scored on the counter. None of that happened today, although it did come close a few times. We lost because we played like boneheads in our own half. This should have been a 1-0 "lucky to get out of there" victory, the kind that class PL teams pull off all the time.
