A note about people's comments on the defensive side of the midfield that I particularly disagree with, you don't have to play with 2 fully defensive midfielder bruisers, there's 2 other box to box players there that can help out with the defensive work, while the top of the diamond and the forwards press further up. its not 3 CAM's in a diamond, Fred has twice the engine necessary to cover for maguire.
There just don't seem to be these Danielle de rossi style complete midfielders you can acquire at the minute and have in your defensive midfield without sacrificing your offensive potential. My concern is our inability to put our best players on the pitch together.
Agree but we have issue's in this regard.
For DM we have tried:
Matic - natural position however lacks mobility and fitness to play this regularly to a high standard
Fred - More box to box but playing as a pure DM limits him and I don't think he's reliable enough to play as a lone DM
McTom - Very raw. Hell of an engine, does some good things but is so basic with his passing and movement. Struggles to be a lone DM
Pogba - Car crash as a DM. Will always miss runners/lose concentration. For a player with his talent, he lacks the discipline to be a DM of any shape.
So we kind of HAVE to play two DM's cos anyone left as a lone DM will get exposed as they have flaws to they're game.
So lets go with the theory of a 3 man midfield with 1 DM, 2 box to box.
It looks like an appealing option, but for me it will leave us a tad exposed and short in attack and certainly we will have zero width. We already struggle to break teams down with a 4-2-3-1 with some width. Our full backs do not do enough attacking wise (Shaw/AWB - Telles may but we shall see. TFM and Williams certainly do nothing offensively), and whats more our CB;s cannot cover the full backs as they lack pace and are frankly appalling at defending 1v1.
As a box to box midfielder Pogba wont do the dirty work and while on paper Donny could be suited to this role - we havent seen enough of him.
McTom doesnt do enough offensively for a box to box player but I do think Fred would suit it well. If we leave any one of the 4 mentioned above exposed in the DM position we are going to be asking for trouble.