I read an interesting preview of our game against Arsenal, where the author showed short passes is one of our important metrics. and I've kept an eye on it over the last three games. It may be a bit daft, but I felt second half we exerted much better pressure on Madrid by having our spacing better and keeping our rhythm on these short passes.
Grealish is key to this, he constantly carries the ball into the right area and it allows us to set the rest of the attack. I'm sure I write this in every post, but if we fail to attack with purpose and establish our positions in the opponent's half, it causes us huge defensive issues.
First half we were getting caught on the ball in stupid places and the gaps between players felt too large. Madrid exploited it a few times.
It would've been great to hold on for 3-2, but taking a draw home is a good result, given we were again missing key personnel for a 'big' game.
We really don't get enough credit for the mentality of our players. They keep turning up and giving it everything, despite the gruelling nature of the last 18 months and winning the lot last season.
It's the classic crunch week now. 3 games across 3 competitions, each presenting a different challenge. Often the most stressful but exciting part of the season!
I think most of our first half issues came down to both Bernie and Rodri uncharacteristically repeatedly making poor decisions and executing poorly on the decent ones. Rodri gave away the ball through poor passes more in that half than he likely did in total over the course of last season (and was out of position for several RM attacks) and Bernie continued to try to dribble through the RM press instead of leveraging triangle advancement (which is not only our normal mode of attacking but a much safer way to go about it), often losing the ball with his back to their goal. Both setup most of the RM counters we saw.
This isn’t heavy criticism, this is just an acknowledgement of what occurred.
Any side in the world is going to struggle when their DM (and arguably their most important player) and the player given the most expansive ‘possession & progression’ role are struggling to retain the ball, often due to bad decision making.
They both tightened that up substantially in the second half and, along with several other tweaks, we actually asserted ourselves over RM much more regularly and authoritatively.
I agree with many analyses of late that a lot of our defensive woes this season comes down to our forward play not necessarily being as fluid as it was last year, which puts more pressure on Rodri and our back four.
Fortunately for us, apart from the last few matches, Rodri has largely been able to compensate.
But now that we are in the latter part of the season, and Rodri’s fitness is being stretched, we are going to need to find ways to help him, especially against sides like Arsenal and RM, who like to press centrally and exploit the wings on the counter.
