Injury crisis is exposing a lack of co-ordinated recruitment for a manager whose success has come on a budgetImagine you are Graham Potter. You consider Arsenal’s probable team to face your Chelsea side today. You look at Mikel Arteta’s front three. You are not sure who will play on the right but even with Ben Chilwell injured again you have Mark Cucurella to play on that side of the defence as well as the option of a more attacking wing-back. Then you look at the other flank, where Gabriel Martinelli has been in sensational form. You remember how he embarrassed Emerson Royal and unsettled Trent Alexander-Arnold, how his pace and directness have troubled teams all season. With Reece James out,...
Using Sterling and Pulisic as wing-backs is not without risk but it makes the team less predictable and is fun when it clicksCallum Hudson-Odoi never really enjoyed playing as a right wing-back. He tried his best when Thomas Tuchel put him there after becoming Chelsea’s head coach in January 2021 but the role never felt a natural fit. “At times, it was OK,” Hudson-Odoi said in an interview with the Athletic this week. “But sometimes in my head I’m thinking: ‘What am I doing, why am I in this position? I’m more defending than attacking.’”All that running towards his own goal took a toll on Hudson-Odoi, cramping the winger’s style, and the result was his departure from Chelsea in August....
As the manager begins to forge a new Anfield team, it’s clear they cannot overwhelm sides as they did at their peakFootball never stops. Brian Clough despaired of the exhausting churn, the sense you could never enjoy a win because there was always another game – and that was before European group stages, Covid-afflicted calendars and winter World Cups. And it never stops changing: there are always new ideas or ways to thwart the old ideas. Standing still, as Peter Reid observed, is moving backwards.That’s why the Hungarian double European Cup-winner Béla Guttmann spoke of the third year as being fatal for a coach. Your players get used to you, so your words lose their impact and minor irritations can...
How a team line up for kick-off no longer reflects what will follow in an era when hybrid systems and fluidity are keyBefore every game the ritual for any fan, pundit, player or coach is to look at the lineups and formations. The debates of how a tactical battle between one team playing 4-4-2 and the other operating with 3-5-2, for example, will be discussed, but in the modern era things are a lot more complex and players do not function in a rigid system. Instead they have individual roles within a carefully designed blueprint.All systems are hybrids and dynamic nowadays, and defining them in terms of traditional formations is too simplistic. How a team line up for kick-off does...
Analysis only makes sense in football when used by those who understand the limits of what statistics can tell youEngland won the second Test against South Africa comfortably enough, but there was a frustrating spell before tea on the first day as Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortje added 35 for the ninth wicket. Having bowled relatively full earlier in the day, England switched to a short-pitched attack to no great effect. Notably it was a full-pitched ball from Ollie Robinson after tea that delivered the breakthrough as Nortje was lbw.So why had England changed approach? Perhaps they had been swayed by the Test against India at Lord’s when they had successfully bounced out the tail, or perhaps it was a...