Re: ARTICLE: Bale, AVB, Formation... Why he should stay
I don't think we will be singing "he plays on the left...."'anymore...
If we have 10 players vs 10 players in the center and right areas of the pitch and no one at all on the left, we should be singing "one of you guys, go play on the left"...
The reason Bale not being on the left was sometimes a problem last season was a mixture of reasons, but it wasn't a case of no one believing he could do anything in the middle or on the right.
The problem was usually down to there simply not being anyone for us on the left, it was insane. We made the pitch smaller for the defending team, that was madness. Dempsey, Holtby, Siggy and other players generally make sure
someone is on the left when Bale roams. Last season if Ade or BAE didn't go over there we would sometimes be doing the opposition's job for them and even BAE and Ade shouldn't be faced with having a wing for the majority of the match. BAE has to be a fullback first and Ade is a striker. Neither of those two are suited to covering for Bale as well as people that have been playing there this season.
Secondly, if Bale didn't get a touch of the ball, he'd still stand there in the middle of a crowd and not come over to the left and into space. This season, he does pick the ball up all over the pitch rather than just standing in a crowded area.
Thirdly, VDV played there, the gain in moving Bale to VDV's position wasn't as big as the loss from moving VDV to the left, so Bale wouldn't have been first choice in that position anyway... But even that doesn't fully describe the reason VDV had the team shaped around him. VDV's importance to us meant he had to play just off the striker to get the most effective performances from him. Modric on the left was a disaster at the end too. For a passer to influence games, taking out almost all options to his left wasn't great but add to that the way Modric was removed from the middle of the pitch where a ball to the right wouldn't have needed to be a beautiful cross field pass (which takes a while to get there)... Everything about that drove me crazy. Anyway, for our style of play to work, we needed Modric and VDV in the middle of the pitch. Bale roaming there meant that he brought way more defenders into the area (if the left is free, no need for defenders to cover it and Bale was a huge threat, so instead of 2 people being over there and a few extra being close enough to cover, everyone packed the area our playmakers were expected to pass through). We generally saw Bale in other people's space and our wing play was reduced to passing to whoever was on the right.
Our team set up in the previous few seasons can be oversimplified down to: Bale and Lennon are going to destroy teams on the wings or Modric and VDV are going to destroy them down the middle. If teams throw tons of men at our wingers, we'll just use Modric and VDV to pass through them... If they want to pack the middle of the pitch, we'll give the ball to Lennon and Bale to beat them on the wings.
I can totally understand experimentation if players are injured or whatever, but it takes time to convert a team to playing a different way, add to that Modric being our best player last season and the team being focused on him as well as Bale and it just wasn't going to work this well. That said, Bale did well last season, until he hit the point that he stopped scoring.
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TLDR: As long as
someone is there, it's ok. (From both an offensive and defensive point of view.)
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While we're on AVB and tactics:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...ndre-Villas-Boass-footballing-philosophy.html
That is an old (as the title hints) article, but a very good article. I love the "many players can't understand the game" quote. Every football fan should be able to relate to that.
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I wonder now if those who cried for VdV can accept that this side has no room for a player who only ever plays 60 minutes maximum...
Ozil.
I can totally accept that point. But VDV is a better passer than any of our current players, VDV scores a ton of goals, VDV was very good at knowing when we needed him deep and when he should effectively be a second striker. We're not the possession team we were, so the last point is not as important this season as last season... We don't need midfield dominance, we can just counter attack. (That said, VDV's passing would have been nice to help spring those counter attacks.) But his passing to unlock defences and his goals to make up for our lack of goals from number 9s at the moment would have been handy.
I don't think I quite come under "those that cried for VDV", but he was one of my favourite players, and I still wish we had someone with his particular set of skills. But you're not saying he wasn't good enough technically, I'm not saying he was the energizer bunny.
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Could this also be the reason for Dembele's driving runs being absent recently? Look at his goal against Lyon...it was a similar move to those that Bale has been doing lately, so perhaps AVB has considered that if Bale does that its more likely to result in a goal, so dembele is playing deeper/more conservatively to give him room to do this.
No, that is what is probably unfairly going to be called the "Scott Parker effect". If you watch Parker against West Ham he generally passed the ball and sprinted forward. That in itself is something I'd love to see from a bunch of players, however the problem with Parker doing that is that Dembele no longer has a DM behind him. When a player makes the conscious decision to move forward and engage an opposition player with the intention of dribbling past him, he must always be aware of what he is risking. If Dembele attempts to dribble past someone, loses the ball and sees a player running straight at our CBs, that situation would entirely be Dembele's fault.
