by YorkshireRoyal99 »
28 Jul 2022 10:09
Coppells Lost Coat Snowflake Royal Laurent was certainly good enough, but he just didn't have the focus on his defensive duties.
So often midfield was awol leaving the CBs unprotected. And a lot of that was management direction. Then there was all the cheap errors giving the ball away in our own third.
I think we are on the same page, I see that as swift and Joao deserted defensive duties, it pushed up Laurent and Rino to attempt to stop opposition midfielders to get a good run in unopposed. Leaving the huge gap between defence and midfield. The knock on effect caused chaos and we collapsed.
The cheap mistakes are part of the game and comes with the territory of playing out from the back - which were doing a terrible job at.
So I am hoping that we set up to be hard to be broken down, might be painful to watch at first but as the season goes on we have enough flair going forward in Ince / Joao / Meite / Hoilet and Ejaria to create goals / problems.
We could have potentially used a CB who is capable of stepping out and engaging the ball, unfortunately that just didn't seem to be the case with anyone who played CB last season, bar maybe Moore up until the debacle in January as well. Whether that was just the players' preference or a tactical instruction is something else. We tried playing like a top of the table team (particularly under Pauno) but we didn't have the quality of player.
A lot of teams that can be hard to break down can be decent to watch. Stifling the game and hoofing it long Allardyce/Pulis style might be a bit much, but there can be good football on display in counter attacking teams. We aren't exactly blessed with pace in the team in general but if we can move the ball quickly that will make up for part of that. But I get the main point, the style of play is less important than what it normally would be, especially this season where we are just wanting to survive again ultimately.