It happened the other night against Lyon. Mazraoui ended up coming into midfield to track their left winger who dropped deep. Dalot tucked in and made it a back three.
I'm tried but couldn't find this video I saw a while back which did a good job of explaining his style and how it defers from other coaches like pep.
There are generally two schools of thought: positional vs relational styles of play.
There was a study about this, ranked managers on which of the two sides they're on.
Amorim like Di zerbi is positional whereas the Peps and Luis Enriques are relational.
one isn't necessarily better than the other and there's flexibility within positional play as well. We just need our players to learn the basics first.
Found it!
I guess today's display was artifact #1 to be presented as my criticism. You can say what you want about the philosophy but ultimately the fact of the matter is we can't deal with a simple man to man press on the build up if the other side has a physical advantage. I've never seen De Zerbi's team's be so outclassed against M2M systems, physical disadvantage or not.
You need some sort of advantage (technical, tactical, physical) to discourage a very aggressive M2M press. Ideally all of these in different areas of the pitch.
Tactical it doesn't seem like we going to get that with Amorim's current system. The players stand around like traffic cones, staying in their positions during build up making the exact same movements up and down the pitch without any variation.
Physical - it's impossible to outfight a side like Newcastle. The good thing is not a lot of sides even in the PL have that level of physical dominance, so we'll mostly be fine if other sides decide to go this aggressive against us. We did generate some advantages here when Livramento went super aggressive on Dalot and he was able to turn and run leading to a few dangerous situations. We were basically out matched everywhere else on the pitch and no one won their duels. Ugarte got a bit of joy but he's a defensive player so even if he beats the initial pressure, you're not going to get a lot of threat from that.
Technical - We don't have a huge technical advantage, so our players could not execute any line breaking passes that could've hurt Newcastle. The moment Shaw came on, he showed off a couple of really solid passes through the middle and they were afraid of pressing him because he can run quite well with the ball. You need really guys of that level to gain consistent technical advantages against a thuggish team like Newcastle.
Anyway, I guess tl;dr Newcastle is our kryptonite right now and I'm not reading too much into this but something to keep an eye on. I would focus on build up effectiveness specifically. The moment I see us employing various tools (rotations, passing, going long, our players winning duels 1v1 and carrying the ball forward, passing breaking the lines) I'll go all in on Amorim.
You can keep an eye on metrics like Danger Zone losses below.
