Northern Ireland…
Time to introduce a new concept to my blog… the commentary section where I’ll just comment on world events, news, life in general and (more likely) sport.
I’ll start with my analysis of Englands problems during last nights horrific 0-1 defeat to Northern Ireland.
I originally wrote this in Hattrick and so had to truncate it to 4000 characters which is why the “Attack” section and last section are truncated. It’s still a fair old read and if you don’t like football I suggest you give it a miss!
Defence : The problem here is the full backs. Cole doesn’t seem to want to play left-back and wants to go forward and Young isn’t good enough. the Gap they usually attacked through was the one between Carragher and Cole. You can’t expect Carragher to plug that full gap since he’s got either Healy or Quinn to look after, and Cole was simply too far forward with no cover (the tactic we played doesn’t really allow for the “Wingers” to get back and cover quite so often, his winger was Wayne Rooney FFS! If you play 4-5-1 you need the full backs to concentrate on defence and Cole was majorly at fault in my eyes (and, as some of you know, I’ve been defending him in the face of prior criticism). Young was positionally sound but his distribution is awful. His passes usually ended up in an Irish attack. Against better opponents we’ll be harshly punished for such errors.
Midfield : Shapeless. Lampard and Gerrard are largely anonymous and don’t look like they know what they’re doing. From my perspective (of having watched gerrard play alot) he’s most effective in a move where he takes the ball plays it square out to the wings (Zenden, Riise) powers forward to the edge of the box, matching their run and then recieving the ball back off them. That’s difficult for defenders to pick up and usually results in a chance for him, or a through ball to a striker and a chance to them. Last night he seemed to have been asked to loop the ball forward over the full back and into wright phillips, with Rooney playing a free-role (and therefore not as easy to find as SWP) this meant that we were basically relying on SWP for ALL our creativity, plus just expecting him to consistently chase, chase, chase. I think SWP is better coming from deep, but last night he was constantly 2/3rds of the way up the pitch, giving him little opportunity to run at the defenders. Lampard seems to have been asked to play in the same way as Gerrard, and both looked as though they were carrying knocks. Either that or they were just lazy\disillusioned. I’ve no idea what Beckham was up to, but constantly looking for the long aired ball should be banned. We looked best when the three of them worked together and interchanged short passes. I think I saw us do that less than 5 times though.
Up Front : well they didn’t get the service did they? Rooney coming in from the left meant he effectively was being marked by two players and that largely negated and frustrated him. This should’ve allowed more room for the midfielders, but they seemed reluctant to move outside of the centre circle and were happy pumping the long flighted balls into SWP instead (as previously mentioned).
The tactics overall were decent as an overview, but the details appear to be all wrong, and the phrase is never better used than in sport “The devil is in the detail” because the details were wrong, players were confused as to their role minute by minute. seeing their instructions weren’t working and not having the guts to go out and try something different (perhaps because they feel they might lose their place) It was very disheartening.
