duncanjwitham

Even at this level, the majority of teams are now playing with one central striker.  And if you are doing that, you cannot afford for that guy to be contributing nothing other than goals.  When Lineker was playing, the vast majority of teams were playing 442 and you could accommodate a goal poacher, with someone alongside him to do the other stuff.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

Even at this level, the majority of teams are now playing with one central striker.  And if you are doing that, you cannot afford for that guy to be contributing nothing other than goals.  When Lineker was playing, the vast majority of teams were playing 442 and you could accommodate a goal poacher, with someone alongside him to do the other stuff.

Even at this level, the majority of teams are now playing with one central striker.  And if you are doing that, you cannot afford for that guy to be contributing nothing other than goals.  When Lineker was playing, the vast majority of teams were playing 442 and you could accommodate a goal poacher, with someone alongside him to do the other stuff.

How many first team regulars/squad-players produced is probably a better measure of an academy's quality than how many superstars.  There's always a massive amount of luck involved in producing the next Rooney or Saka or whatever.  But if you're consistently filling out your first team with decent players, then it gives you so much more flexibility in terms of buying players.  You can spend your resources on one or two really good players, instead of having to spread it around to fill your squad out.  And I'd say we've pretty damn well in that regard, with 4 regulars last season, and it could have easily been 7 or 8 without admin etc.  Plus any number of others getting regular football at Championship level or higher.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

How many first team regulars/squad-players produced is probably a better measure of an academy's quality than how many superstars.  There's always a massive amount of luck involved in producing the next Rooney or Saka or whatever.  But if you're consistently filling out your first team with decent players, then it gives you so much more flexibility in terms of buying players.  You can spend your resources on one or two really good players, instead of having to spread it around to fill your squad out.  And I'd say we've pretty damn well in that regard, with 4 regulars last season, and it could have easily been 7 or 8 without admin etc.  Plus any number of others getting regular football at Championship level or higher.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

How many first team regulars/squad-players produced is probably a better measure of an academy's quality than how many superstars.  There's always a massive amount of luck involved in producing the next Rooney or Saka or whatever.  But if you're consistently filling out your first team with decent players, then it gives you so much more flexibility in terms of buying players.  You can spend your resources on one or two really good players, instead of having to spread it around to fill your squad out.  And I'd say we've pretty damn well in that regard, with 4 regulars last season, and it could have easily been 7 or 8 without admin etc.  Plus any number of others getting regular football at Championship level or higher.

How many first team regulars/squad-players produced is probably a better measure of an academy's quality than how many superstars.  There's always a massive amount of luck involved in producing the next Rooney or Saka or whatever.  But if you're consistently filling out your first team with decent players, then it gives you so much more flexibility in terms of buying players.  You can spend your resources on one or two really good players, instead of having to spread it around to fill your squad out.  And I'd say we've pretty damn well in that regard, with 4 regulars last season, and it could have easily been 7 or 8 without admin etc.  Plus any number of others getting regular football at Championship level or higher.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

Tiny request, but any chance we can have the post title changed to something like "David McGoldrick - negotiating extension"?  I keep seeing the post get bumped with "Signed 1 year deal" in the title and have to click through to find out if it's actually a new deal or not.

He married his (Portuguese IIRC) girlfriend in the intervening period, and got in on an EU spousal visa, if memory serves.

Sure, a player or players can lose you a game, but the manager having a stinker and sending the wrong team out in the wrong setup can also lose you the game even at the level we find ourselves at right now.
It's a convenient line for a manager to say it's never tactics and always the players, but it simply isnt true.

Not sure what you're saying on this. 
Pep is one of the best tacticians of all time.
A team I would look at that "don't need tactics" is Real Madrid. Look what happened the other night... City played Real off the park tactically.

That's a weird one though because we looked better earlier on in the season when he went to 4 at the back because his insistence on 3 wasn't working, so I'm not sure it's really wing-backs-or-a-flat-back-4 that's the key issue.
The change from trying to force NML & Barkhuizen to play wing back, with Knight & Roberts taking over these positions, made us defensively a bit more reliable again (after that terrible run) - it also allowed us to keep the ball and control play a bit  better up field with a small tactical tweaks putting NML & Sibley (and whoever else) closer to McGoldrick. 
In the end it was a change too late to have any major effect because the players had I'd argue, pretty much ran their race - it was just covered up better.
I think it's all a bit moot at this point anyway tbh - we don't entirely know what Warne is going to do tactically next season and we don't know what players we're going to bring in.
 

I don't think we ever really had a proper game-plan at any point in the season, even when we went however many games unbeaten.  The only thing we seemed to consistently be doing was letting them have the ball at the back and trying to bait them into a mistake, which worked at times (Bristol Rovers at home, for example), but most teams aren't going to try and play out against us.  Beyond that, we weren't setting out to get wide and cross for Collins, or play into McGoldrick's feet and build from there, or sit deep and play on the break, or anything else.  Sometimes we did some of those things, but we spent as much time with Roberts crossing into nobody, or Cashin playing big diagonals to McGoldrick's head etc.
Whether we genuinely didn't bother having a plan, or the players were just struggling to execute what they'd been told to do, it's difficult to tell from the side-lines.  But I certainly think the majority of games that we won, we basically won because we had better players than the other team.  I don't think we won many games because our tactics elevated us in some way, or we exploited a flaw in the opposition's system, or we out-thought them.  And I'm not ignoring the work-rate stuff, but I think there's only so far that can take you - it's important, but you aren't going to consistently win games by purely running around more than the other team.
To be clear... work hard, defend well and let your good players win you the game isn't the worst idea in the world.  I don't think it's the best idea either, but there's far worse ones out there.  But if you're going to do that, you have to get your best players in positions they're comfortable with, and I certainly don't think a back 3 does that with the squad we had.

Was it? If you're basing that on the uptick in results at the end of the season when we switched to a back 3, that entirely coincided with going back to playing poor teams again (Burton, Exeter, Bristol, MK Dons etc).  And as soon as we went back to playing decent teams again (Portsmouth, Sheff Wed), we picked up 1 point from 6 to end the season.  And over the whole season, the vast majority of our good performances were with a back 4.

I don't think we ever really had a proper game-plan at any point in the season, even when we went however many games unbeaten.  The only thing we seemed to consistently be doing was letting them have the ball at the back and trying to bait them into a mistake, which worked at times (Bristol Rovers at home, for example), but most teams aren't going to try and play out against us.  Beyond that, we weren't setting out to get wide and cross for Collins, or play into McGoldrick's feet and build from there, or sit deep and play on the break, or anything else.  Sometimes we did some of those things, but we spent as much time with Roberts crossing into nobody, or Cashin playing big diagonals to McGoldrick's head etc.
Whether we genuinely didn't bother having a plan, or the players were just struggling to execute what they'd been told to do, it's difficult to tell from the side-lines.  But I certainly think the majority of games that we won, we basically won because we had better players than the other team.  I don't think we won many games because our tactics elevated us in some way, or we exploited a flaw in the opposition's system, or we out-thought them.  And I'm not ignoring the work-rate stuff, but I think there's only so far that can take you - it's important, but you aren't going to consistently win games by purely running around more than the other team.
To be clear... work hard, defend well and let your good players win you the game isn't the worst idea in the world.  I don't think it's the best idea either, but there's far worse ones out there.  But if you're going to do that, you have to get your best players in positions they're comfortable with, and I certainly don't think a back 3 does that with the squad we had.

I really don't think that's a good group of centre halves for a back 3 though.  In a back 3, the wider centre halves basically have to be able to play as fullbacks, because they have to come out wide and support the wingback when attacks are coming down that side.  So they need to be able to deal with tricky wingers running at them.  Forsyth and Chester can both do it, but Chester barely played all season, and Forsyth is the wrong side of 30 and was being played on his wrong foot towards the end of the season.  Cashin, Davies and Stearman are all far better at tackling, winning headers, engaging physically with strikers etc, than dealing with pace running at them.  If you play them in the wider positions you're just exposing them to what they're weakest at.  
And if you don't have your wide centre halves coming out to support, you either have to have wingers helping out (in which case you aren't playing a back 3, you're playing a very negative back 5), or you get killed out wide because they've got an overload every single time they get the ball out there.
And it was like that all over the team.  We had Cashin forced into dealing with pace, Forsyth on his wrong foot, Knight and Roberts playing as wingbacks (when neither of them can cross, neither of them are particularly good dribblers etc), NML as a Number 10.  That's 5 players in positions they aren't totally comfortable with.  And if you start shuffling those players into positions they are comfortable with, it just creates problems elsewhere (NML, Barkhuizen at wingback etc). With the back 4, we had one of Knight or Smith at right back, and sometimes Sibley at left back. That's 1 or 2.
Fundamentally, I think the big reason we struggled to score goals last season was we seemed to lack any kind of game-plan going forward.  We didn't seem to be setting out specifically to do anything, it was just run around a lot and hope we can force them into a mistake.  So that meant we were very reliant on individual players winning games for us.  And if you're in that kind of position, the more players you have in positions they aren't comfortable with, the harder it's going to be to win games.

Was it? If you're basing that on the uptick in results at the end of the season when we switched to a back 3, that entirely coincided with going back to playing poor teams again (Burton, Exeter, Bristol, MK Dons etc).  And as soon as we went back to playing decent teams again (Portsmouth, Sheff Wed), we picked up 1 point from 6 to end the season.  And over the whole season, the vast majority of our good performances were with a back 4.