simonhch
Horrible boss
Generally speaking though players have positions and the best teams keep their players in the position that suits them best.
Even Rooney and Ronaldo, eventually they settled on a specific role.
Liverpool don't have Salah moving around all over the place. Arsenal don't have Martinelli and Saka switching around.
I've always argued against "fluid" styles. Bit of a meaningless buzzword to me. It doesn't really exist in reality.
It doesn’t exist so much now, because of the rise of fixed positional play - which is really a product of the Tiki-taka era. But it has existed to great effect.
What I am getting at though, isn’t so much that, it is making the best use of the players we have. Having two inside forwards cutting in, is making us very narrow because our full backs are either injured, poor going forward, or playing inverted themselves. We desperately need some variety and width.
what I’m suggesting is that the left forward plays as the current inside forward and the right sided forward is encouraged to stretch the play more and go on the outside. Stick closer to the touchline. Our two best wide forwards are probably Rashford and Garnacho. I wouldn’t want to have one of them permanently reverted to a wide right role, but I would like them both to play and interchange during games using the system I just described. So not fluid in the sense of positional play, but fluid in the sense of swapping flanks with each other. Likewise, I’d like to see Antony used on the left sometimes, going on the outside to stretch play and use his left to a different effect.
In midfield I think we are currently best served with a double pivot, which should in my mind be Casemiro and Eriksen. We desperately miss Eriksen’s line breaking passes, and play Bruno or Mount as the 10. I have no issues rotating them. Good squads need variation and depth. And Bruno is so overplayed it’s absurd. For the double pivot you can rotate Amrabat, McTominay, and Mainoo in, and Hannibal can play as either a pivot or a 10, again, as squad depth.
We have to use all our players in rotation to compete across all competitions. That’s the point of a squad. Casemiro, like Bruno, is terribly overplayed and it shows he had so many games last year plus the World Cup, at 30. Some games he just has to be left out for Amrabat.
The only two players I think we have that can actually link up the midfield between the defensive portion and the attacking phase, are Eriksen and Mainoo. Which is a poor state of affairs. One at the end of his career, the other at his beginning. Mount has clearly been signed to be that player, but he’s going to take a while to adjust to that role. Because he’s naturally more of a 10 or inside forward. Bruno is too erratic at the simple things to really play that role. You want him on the pitch more often than not, but primarily you want him in the attacking third as a ten. Yet, with Mount on board, he doesn’t need to play every game.
Mount is a very good player, tidy and intelligent, but playing as a true 8 is very different than playing as a 10, and I think it’ll take him the best part of a whole season to get fully used to doing that. And I don’t think the fans will ever be that patient.
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