True to a certain extent, but we had 3 centre backs and none of them were that convincing. Also, I'm pretty sure Martial and Lingard did their fair share of defensive work. I think the former even tracked back and helped Young out a few times.
Yeah, I think we got outnumbered in midfield. Ozil, Ramsey, Alexis were all over us in midfield. Maybe if we played with 2 top centre backs who actually could defend to a high level, we'd have been able to have an extra midfielder.
We went into the match with a gameplan and it worked.
We let them have a lot of the ball and get forward a lot, and then we break and hit them when they were weak. It worked out because we were so clinical in the first 10 minutes.
After that our setup wasnt right for the rest of the game. We didnt need to give them all of the ball and invite pressure, because we didnt need to score. But we carried on like that anyway.
The 3 CBs were fine, plenty of good teams have used that system. But we needed a more solid midfield system and perhaps less in attack. And of course then Pogba got sent off so we had even more problems there. Lingard was great on the break, but perhaps he could have been replaced or at least asked to just keep the ball after we were 2 up. With a 3 in CM we should have had more than the 24.9% of the ball that we had overall. I think Ander, or even Blind in there as the 3rd man would have helped us keep the ball, although it would have been less exciting than trying to break all the way up the pitch with Lingard.