Given I was complaining about it for ages and saying how dumb our pass network charts were, using 2 #10's... It's only fair to put yesterday's in. Very clearly told Mainoo as that second midfielder to play as a double pivot compared to pushing him up. Led to a much better performance. Still a huge gap between the deep players and the attack, but no surprise that dropping one of them deeper led to a much more balanced performance (even if we lost control of the game again, though I'd put that down to the refs garbage decision and shit subs more than the system).
Good post. How this can be observed and how I personally observe it is that ETH wants those lines to be slightly distanced one from another as a part of his “best transition team in the league” plan.
That gap between the lines creates a lot of space as the opponent’s defence is tested not to go too high due to the pace of Rashford, Hojlund and Garnacho.
With numerous players in the squad who have ability to play that incisive progressive passess in the first phase like Martinez, Dalot, Mainoo and to some extent Casemiro, we can quickly transform from the build up phase to attacking the defensive zone of the opponent, as we saw numerous times against Wolves yesterday.
Especially when those passes are played into our focal point of attack, Hojlund, who we can often see dropping deep - the reason why I can understand that our club was recently linked with a move for players like Zirkzee and Ekitike, who both are very good at it.
This starting eleven is very well competent to play very good football and execute ETH's plans, but the drop in quality of football when one of them is missing is worrying.
For example, put McTominay instead of Mainoo and our midfield is wide open as he tends to be at the end of things due to his personality as a player, just like Bruno. I hope our new recruitment will be very well aware of those details.
What’s your thoughts ?