FantasyIreland said:
What makes you qustion Paddys tactical credentials Damo?
Mainly because I'm being unfair to him.
Paddy seems to quite player oriented in terms of how he manages the EDS - he'll move players around in different positions to help their development rather than win the game and this seems to be the root of all of his decisions, "what is best for the development".
At times though this has led to decisions that seem to go against what is best for the game in general. A good example was a group game away against Roma where we struggled in the first half and battered them in the last 30 minutes. We started well with one of our midfielders dropping off and playing that quarterback type role but when they switched to 3 at the back and moved another man into midfield, they marked him out of the game and were twatting us down the wings with Maffeo struggling. This came about because Ambrose who was playing in front of him and guarding the runs from the opposing fullback was actually switched centrally whilst Celina was moved over to the right. At the time I thought this was madness because it actually made us weaker and gave their winger loads of time and space as they were doubling up and Celina wasn't tracking as well as Ambrose was.
We scraped through the half to be honest and were lucky to remain 0-0 for the hour. After the hour mark, Vieira switched it around again where he brought on Dilrosun to go down the left and switched Barker to the troubling right side, Ambrose/Celina up front in a two with Bryan/Bryne in the centre. Then we twatted them and ran out 4-0.
Took me a little while to work out why he did that but it's always stuck with me since. He must have seen that we were getting battered down that wing as their guy was running the game really obviously. I've come to the conclusion that he did that because he noticed the winger/full back getting a bit of success and decided to give Celina a job to do defensively where to be honest he isn't the greatest. Ambrose doesn't really need to keep an eye on a fullback as part of his development and already does that well when he's part of our attacking 3. He threw Maffeo under the bus a bit or you could say that he showed his confidence in him in his ability to put a weaker defender in front of him.
Whilst this is wonderful for player development and there's the argument that we were already through, he does little things like that semi-regularly at the expense of our solidness. Sometimes it's hard to decipher if it's a lesson he's trying to show a player or he just made a mistake and depending on my mood Vieira is either tactically inept or a tremendous teacher or somewhere in between.
