Swales lives said:
What about Carrick, the best distributor of the ball in Europe?
He is amazing!
The best we've played in Europe in the past 3 years was with a Carrick-Giggs midfield two. The whole premise being that Carrick dropped deep, not quite sitting in front of the back four, but not too far from it either. Giggs drifted wide left to receive passes from deep from Evans/Carrick, then supplied Nani/Rooney/Park out on the left. The only reason we didn't get overrun in midfield [the final, being the obvious exception] was because Rooney dropped deep more often than not, and Park was everywhere. When the opposition had the ball we were a bit like;
----------------VDS---------------
Raf/Fab---Evans---Ferdinand---Evra
--------Carrick---------------------
---------------------Giggs---------
----------Rooney---------Park-----
Valencia/Nani----------------------
-----------------------------------
-----------------------------------
-----------------------------------
-------Hernandez------------------
However when going forward, we either distributed the ball to our wide men extremely quickly, often shifting it out wide in our own half and relying on Valencia to beat their full-back for pace, or played a few quick triangles in the middle and lumped it forward, hoping that Hernandez beat the offside trap [which he did, on occasion].
We play completely differently to that, now. Instead of virtually bypassing the midfield with the main part of our play, this season we've focussed more down the middle and relied less on our wingers. We've even played a midfield diamond on occasion, which felt extremely awkward, but was interesting to watch. Kagawa isn't a winger either, so whenever he starts "out wide", he inevitably drifts inside and sits in front of the middle two.
He'll try and start a ball-playing midfield two against Madrid and soon realise that you can't fight fire with fire if you're using a Zippo against a flamethrower. Personally I'd like to see some form of 4-3-3 in the matches against them, with a front three of Rooney on the left, RVP through the middle, and Valencia starting on the right.
