Burnley 1-0 Wolves: The Verdict

[Johnny75]

Agreed we create few chances, but so do a lot of other teams in the PL. The difference is (with the good teams) they have the quality up top (and midfield) to finish those chances. But even lowly Burnley yesterday for instance, 1 chance = 1 goal.
If you have no focal point up top players just don't knock it in the box, or even pass to them to make the chances. We have 2 good wing backs who get up there to create chances but rarely cross it.
We always try to walk the ball in rather than make the telling pass and there's a reason for that. Fuck, unless it's a corner we have no one to head the ball! And then we don't get the corners in the correct place.

It doesn't matter what system we play when you have Hwang, Trincao and Fabio. They aren't good enough for the PL never mind for top 8 PL. Unfortunately Raul,and now Neto aren't with it. When you are relying on Jonny or Nelson to score (who had the 2 best chances yesterday) there is a massive problem, as the stats tell us.
Podence and Neves are our chance creators. Without them we are quite frankly toothless in creating opportunities to score.

Summer is huge, and could go both ways, but we have to give Bruno his own players and some time imo. Bring a new manager in now isn't replacing one person. It's a whole team of people. Then it's a start again job.

That's quite a lot of words to say the same thing as you have previously.

I'm not sure if we have finishers as we don't create good enough chances because our attacking play is rubbish, particularly away from home.

It may be both but it's hard to tell with the pedestrian garbage Lage is serving up at the moment. The Leicester fan sums it up perfectly for me

We obviously don't agree so best to leave it there

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

Summer is huge, and could go both ways, but we have to give Bruno his own players and some time imo. Bring a new manager in now isn't replacing one person. It's a whole team of people. Then it's a start again job.

So what, I don't care if we lose his no-name coaches as well, they've hardly done a stunning job so far, especially as we apparently work on attacking play a lot and hardly ever score. Roberts can stay I suppose, he isn't particularly tied to Lage, he didn't work with him before.

Why do we have to give him his own players? What suggests that would materially change the way we play? Or stop him picking weird teams? Or talking shite all the time? Or losing tamely every time we go 1-0 down? He hasn't earned anything.

 

[PuntsWolf]

“We can’t play with less defenders” is one of the biggest myths going and still winds me up. Newcastle just smashed Norwich 0-3 with a back 4 of Targett, Burn, Lascelles and Krafth. We do not have worse players than that. If the players are coached and set up correctly they could play any system. 5-6 of the players yesterday didn’t fit that system anyway.

Still, the formation is not the magic bullet. We weren’t short of players in attacking situations yesterday but still couldn’t score/create. That was poor quality/decision making, which could be because we have no plan and get into those positions with such irregularity.

 

[Tony Towner]

“We can’t play with less defenders” is one of the biggest myths going and still winds me up. Newcastle just smashed Norwich 0-3 with a back 4 of Targett, Burn, Lascelles and Krafth. We do not have worse players than that. If the players are coached and set up correctly they could play any system. 5-6 of the players yesterday didn’t fit that system anyway.

Still, the formation is not the magic bullet. We weren’t short of players in attacking situations yesterday but still couldn’t score/create. That was poor quality/decision making, which could be because we have no plan and get into those positions with such irregularity.

It also doesn't matter how many defenders you have back if you make fundamental defensive mistakes like yesterday. Coady passes Wieghorst off to Moutinho who doesn't look like he knows it and even if he does it's the wrong thing to do. Coady has to follow that run whether we play 2 or 3 centre halves, his failure to do means Boly has to come over and Vydra has a tap in. One very basic error in defending costs the goal.

 

[Carrotdude]

We’ve looked utterly clueless going forwards for a long, long time. No one runs off the ball, no one joins from midfield. Everyone looks like a centre back who’s ventured forward and found themselves on the edge of the opposition box.

The players aren’t great, but the lack of any coherent plan or idea of how we’re trying to score is absolutely on the coaching staff.

 

[PuntsWolf]

It also doesn't matter how many defenders you have back if you make fundamental defensive mistakes like yesterday. Coady passes Wieghorst off to Moutinho who doesn't look like he knows it and even if he does it's the wrong thing to do. Coady has to follow that run whether we play 2 or 3 centre halves, his failure to do means Boly has to come over and Vydra has a tap in. One very basic error in defending costs the goal.

Yep. Just can’t legislate for that. Moutinho is effectively dropping is for Saiss as he’s gone out to help Jonny who is 2 v 1. But then Coady is marking no one, so why are you passing him on and then playing an awful offside when you have no idea what’s behind you and you even played him on yourself. If he hadn’t have stepped out he probably could have got accross to prevent the need for Boly to do so. So so bad.

 

[AndyWolves]

So our defenders aren't good enough, as highlighted in the last few posts. Exposing them more will mean they make more mistakes.

 

[Tony Towner]

Not necessarily, for a start we have 4 full backs who are all better full backs than wing backs so that improves you defensively. I would concede that a centre half pair of whoever you pick is sub optimal, but not worse than some of the other options in the PL.

It also disregards the additional attacking player you have on the pitch, take yesterday's starting 11 as an example and swap out Coady for a fit Neto or Podence. Would we be more vulnerable at the back - potentially, would we be more effective going forwards - absolutely. Which would cost us or gain us more, who knows, but nobody can categorically say we HAVE to play the way we do, because the defence is poor. It's a choice.

 

[AndyWolves]

We don't HAVE to play the way we do, but I feel playing any other way would mean we would concede more goals than any extra we would score.

 

[Johnny75]

Not necessarily, for a start we have 4 full backs who are all better full backs than wing backs so that improves you defensively. I would concede that a centre half pair of whoever you pick is sub optimal, but not worse than some of the other options in the PL.

It also disregards the additional attacking player you have on the pitch, take yesterday's starting 11 as an example and swap out Coady for a fit Neto or Podence. Would we be more vulnerable at the back - potentially, would we be more effective going forwards - absolutely. Which would cost us or gain us more, who knows, but nobody can categorically say we HAVE to play the way we do, because the defence is poor. It's a choice.

Take a formation of

Sa

Jonny Boly Gomes RAN
Neves
Moutinho Cundle
Neto ---------------- Podence
Raul​

And stick them in a Klopp style Gegenpress. I would guarantee we would be infinitely better to watch with more goals and no doubt more conceded.

It's about coaching and management. Lage isn't good enough with these players to do something like that.

It has nothing to do with these players not being able to do it. They could.

 

[Johnny75]

We don't HAVE to play the way we do, but I feel playing any other way would mean we would concede more goals than any extra we would score.

I would bet you're wrong. But there's no way to prove that right now. We've played the same crap under two managers now. It's deeper than just the coaches.

 

[AndyWolves]

Not necessarily, for a start we have 4 full backs who are all better full backs than wing backs so that improves you defensively. I would concede that a centre half pair of whoever you pick is sub optimal, but not worse than some of the other options in the PL.

It also disregards the additional attacking player you have on the pitch, take yesterday's starting 11 as an example and swap out Coady for a fit Neto or Podence. Would we be more vulnerable at the back - potentially, would we be more effective going forwards - absolutely. Which would cost us or gain us more, who knows, but nobody can categorically say we HAVE to play the way we do, because the defence is poor. It's a choice.

Swapping Hwang for Neto / Podence would achieve the same result without sacrificing defensively.

 

[PuntsWolf]

They weren’t exposed then either. Just had one man to mark and played a shit offside trap instead.

Your also less likely to pass people on in a 4, you just deal with your man as you are more man for man and not “free/spare man”.

I can understand a RB trying to play an offside trap if they know they can’t directly influence the play from where they are, but Coady is right there as the LCB with a guy running in the inside left channel. Plus it’s Weghorst who is probably the only player in the league slower than Coady.

He has no idea what’s behind him, he can still get accross and stop the play even if he doesn’t follow him originally.

 

[AndyWolves]

I would bet you're wrong. But there's no way to prove that right now. We've played the same crap under two managers now. It's deeper than just the coaches.

The, very limited, evidence to date suggests whenever we play 4 at the back we're decidedly ropey.

 

[redvictor]

So what, I don't care if we lose his no-name coaches as well, they've hardly done a stunning job so far, especially as we apparently work on attacking play a lot and hardly ever score. Roberts can stay I suppose, he isn't particularly tied to Lage, he didn't work with him before.

Why do we have to give him his own players? What suggests that would materially change the way we play? Or stop him picking weird teams? Or talking shite all the time? Or losing tamely every time we go 1-0 down? He hasn't earned anything.

To be fair it's pretty pointless arguing any point about Bruno with you as you hate the bloke, which is tainting everything you post about him.
BTW, He did work with Roberts before at Swansea, which is why he got a job here.

 

[PuntsWolf]

Oh and we aren’t scoring and are still conceding so it’s not exactly working is it.

Plus our best performances last year came with a 4

 

[redvictor]

Oh and we aren’t scoring and are still conceding so it’s not exactly working is it.

Plus our best performances last year came with a 4 last year.

Conceding as little as the top 3 teams. In fact at one point we were 5th best in Europe at not conceding. Even since we went a bit shit we have still only conceded a max of 2 in a match. We don't score! So even with a mean defence we can't win games if we can't score more than the opposition. Which at the moment is clearly the case.
Guess what? Even the top teams concede goals. They can score more is why they are up there.

 

[AndyWolves]

If the reason we're conceding is because our defenders make mistakes, asking them the be better defensively isn't going to help.

Being more open defensively won't help unless we can score more, or in other words see a net positive return on our goals. I just don't see us suddenly creating more / better chances due to all the reasons previously mentioned.

 

[Deutsch Wolf]

To be fair it's pretty pointless arguing any point about Bruno with you as you hate the bloke, which is tainting everything you post about him.
BTW, He did work with Roberts before at Swansea, which is why he got a job here.

Ah, this old Mother Hubbard again.

I wish he was good, why wouldn't I. He isn't though. I don't like him because his football is shit and the results have been awful lately.

 

[PuntsWolf]

If the reason we're conceding is because our defenders make mistakes, asking them the be better defensively isn't going to help.

Being more open defensively won't help unless we can score more, or in other words see a net positive return on our goals. I just don't see us suddenly creating more / better chances due to all the reasons previously mentioned.

It’s not that binary. You know more about football than this (or maybe I’m wrong and you don’t), so don’t know why your being like this.

Playing a back 4 doesn’t mean your open, it doesn’t mean you have more to do. You can just be a kick it and hoof it CB and are less likely to be dragged into channels for a start.

Playing more forward players doesn’t neccesarily mean you will be better in attack same as less defenders doesn’t mean you will be open in defence.