Well as someone who thought with improvement to come from several of our players this season and more experience plus a couple of promising signings we would have another very good season i'm now worried. I know some will say it's too early and we did ok tonight but there's some serious problems tactically that Nuno is struggling with and so are our players, there's other things at play like every error seems to lead to a goal right now but this all comes from our play and mentality. I know there's a difference in opinion on how we played tonight but despite a couple of good chances for Cutrone and Dendoncker we were not very good and we just don't look as fluid as last year. Obviously if they take those chances it looks better but it would be papering over some serious cracks.
Anyway tactically, i've mentioned previously that when we have the ball Neves is far too deep so i thought i'd look at that a bit more tonight and i counted at least 5 times he was behind Coady, then for some reason when we have the ball in defensive areas for some reason we are going to back four of Bennett, Coady, Neves and Boly. This is leading to some serious issues both in our build up and then when we lose the ball, for example; -
Neves dropping where he is is leaving massive gaps centrally especially when the other 2 midfielders are wider.
When they drop deep centrally it's leaving massive gaps behind the front 2 meaning there's no link
We are then playing really poor clips at head/chest height to whoever is upfront and it keeps coming back as they are under pressure from cb's and midfielders under no pressure are picking up those balls
Coady is in the team to be the organising ball playing sweeper, with Neves dropping there his passing becomes redundant as he just gives it to him
With the back 4 the ball travels sideways far too much and the tempo is poor and easy for sides to set up against
All of this means the ball is coming back far too much, we can't press in areas like last year and can't set the traps we did putting us under more pressure and leading to more individual errors
It looks like players are really struggling to adapt to it and several of them are way out of form, Neves and Dendoncker in particular and Coady looks like he's struggling now too.
If Nuno wants us to go to that back 4 in possession then he has to change a few other things, the wing backs have to push on a lot more and come inside more with the ball to link and the 2 other central midfielders need to be more central and 1 has to be deeper and one pushed on. This still lets us set traps, it gives us out balls and doesn't leave gaping holes in between our players. That's a massive change though and i'd rather we just went back to what we were doing last year with Neves and the team 5/10 yards further up or we go to a deeper 2 narrow in front of Coady with an attacking player behind the front 2.
Nuno has mentioned tonight that we aren't playing well so at least he knows that but he's not seeing games like he should be either, we had one really good spell tonight just after half time but we didn't press home that advantage and any momentum or creativity went really once MGW went off. He did give the ball away a bit but he was looking to be positive and go forwards and played 2 or 3 fabulous passes that we arguably should have scored from. I've been very positive since Nuno came in and couldn't be any other way really because of what he's done and we had one spell last year where we didn't pick up points but we still looked like winning games and played quite well in some of those games like Arsenal and Brighton away, he still saw something wrong changed it and we improved again. This is a bigger problem right now and Sunday becomes a massive game as we are lacking confidence and only winning games is going to improve that and it needs to be done very quickly. Luckily there's still a long way to go and the problems can be rectified but losing and conceding goals is hard habit to get rid of once you get it.
