Re: Soldado - Official! - Medical Completed!!
This "movement" notion, especially when applied to the Arsenal game, is a myth.
I was watching him very closely and he doesn't move any better than Defoe or Adebayor. He wasn't doing anything.
I'm still a bit staggered we spent so much money on someone so limited. His finishing may well be exceptional, I don't honestly know, but if that's all he has to offer, which seems to be the case, the team has to be so tailored around him, and every pass so precise, it's a massively risky transfer.
Poyet recently said this sort of one dimensional limitation is exactly why Darren Bent falls out of favour with managers - you have to play in such a defined way.
This isn't to say he won't succeed, but you do have to wonder why no one has looked at him before, and why these sort of strikers have gone out of the game.
When Levy refuses to sanction a large bid for a striker, he is a harangued for being tight-fisted. This summer we had massively increased TV revenues (which caused many clubs to spend a net £25m+) and we still came out of the summer in profit from our transfer dealings. For once it was not so risky for Levy to lay down some serious cash, so he finally did what Spurs fans have been crying out for him to do for years. Surely in this context the fee is irrelevant so long as he ticks all the boxes as a player.
You criticise his movement against Arsenal, yet in that game Soldado had little opportunity to showcase it. We dominated possession and controlled the midfield, but only in areas completely comfortable for the opposition, and well away from Soldado. He was isolated not because of a lack of movement from him, but an inability to stretch the opposition with the ball and get players into areas where his movement could be exploited. I still seem to remember a straight ball from Capoue that found Soldado's diagonal run into one of the channels, it just so happened that these balls were few and far between.
Of course the movement discussed above is only one aspect of 'movement' for a striker, he could have also dropped deeper and ventured to the wings in search of possession and to link the play. But that sounds a lot like what Adebayor was lambasted for last season, what caused him to score so few goals, but was instrumental in Bale's goalscoring. This year we have no Bale, so vacating the space in front of the CBs early in build-up is not going to be as productive because we have no-one positioned behind the striker with the mobility and goal threat to take advantage of such movement (Paulinho doesn't count). Last year, Bale would sometimes even play off the shoulder of the defender because Adebayor had traveled so far, this year we have no-one who can provide that threat in behind, which pins the defence back and provides more space in midfield.
So it makes sense tactically for Soldado to restrain his movement early in the build-up - if he started dropping deep, the opposition (especially Arsenal) could squeeze up and pressure us into a mistake. Now of course Townsend and Chadli could be used to push the defence back by playing higher up, but then we would shape up more like Barcelona, with Soldado in the Messi role as a false 9. Soldado is an excellent player but Messi he is not. Furthermore this would put a greater creative burden on the CMs, none of whom against Arsenal were the type of player you would associate with vision and long passing akin to Xavi.
Most importantly though, Soldado's best work in terms of intelligent movement comes in the box. If our wingers and full-backs hit good, or even mediocre, balls to the front/back post, Soldado will be waiting to knock them goalwards, and he finishes with such composure and subtlety that he often scores. With a proper playmaker, someone to set the rhythm and circulate the ball quickly in the space between the opposition defence and midfield, causing a bit more panic and exposing a few more holes across the pitch, we will see more of Soldado peeling off his man to be played through by Eriksen/Holtby and more of our wide players hitting the byline to cut balls back across the face for him to tap in.
This is a type of movement Defoe and especially Ade do not have in their locker. Defoe went through a phase of meeting Lennon's cutbacks at the front post, but Soldado can actually read the play of his teammates and the opposition and make a decision as to how to get that half yard before the ball comes to him (as opposed to Defoe who creates this space on the ball with a quick shuffle). That is the art of the tap-in - how many tap-ins do you remember us scoring last year from well worked moves? Part of this was due to Bale playing through the middle, but the fact was that no-one was there. Often we would be in the final third with 1 man in the box!
If we had a player who could help us retain possession higher up the pitch against Arsenal I firmly believe we would have witnessed the guile in Soldado's penalty area movement. What is he supposed to do when Vertonghen and Dawson are playing keepball on the halfway line? Give him a couple of months, or even a couple of games with a full-strength team at least...