The thing is, it’s not one player, it’s a couple of players (Hotly and Eriksen) who can bring out the best in the other quality signings we’ve only just made, along with time for them to gell together and start playing fast intricate football between each other, with plenty of incisive movement, rather than laboured and confused attacks which break down because of a lack of understanding or practice. You’re right that AVB’s teams aren’t full on attacking, they’re patient and build up, but they do get lots of goals through sustained pressure and possession along good, smart bursts of passing between players. We don’t have that this season but we saw the seeds of it last season.
For example, last season we had the second most shots per game (
http://www.whoscored.com/Regions/25...amStatistics/England-Premier-League-2012-2013) and yet we scored almost nothing. What did we change to improve that? We bought in someone who can turn those innacurate shots, or pokes straight at the keeper, into goals in Soldado. The issue? We’re not getting as many shots now. Why? Because we’ve lost our main creative fulcrum in Bale and replaced him with Dembele or Sigg, who just aren’t showing the same threat. That lack of threat is more than just about bales masses of goals, it lets the opposition approach us in a whole different way.
A big difference for me is with a player like Eriksen (as with bale) hovering around the oppositions box, their centrebacks will want to actually take the ball off of him sooner as he can do some damage with time on the ball, as opposed to dembele who they will know they just need to pressurise to force him to pass backwards. Dembele can go round opposition midfielders for fun in his own half but once he gets to their box he stops, and teams will be well versed in that. He draws the player, then doesn’t have the confidence to pass round them (or does and it is intercepted, which happened a few times against ****) or he panics and passes back. Sigg seems to be similar in the he can pick out a shot but he doesn’t have the confidence to play a challenging ball, and he certainly never takes their defence on for us. He’s just not threatening, that could change with a run of form but in his appearances he’s offered the same sort of play as Dembele.
With Eriksen he has a lot less strength on the ball but if you watch the games he played against Emirates Marketing Project, it was clear that if you just pressure him he will enjoy drawing the player and using that space to either move into himself, win a foul, or play a ball to whoever moves into it. Who would have been moving into it? It could be any one of our striker, widemen, fullbacks or even the box to box midfielder depending on the state of transition we’re in and the area of the pitch.
You know it’s not as simple as highlighting individual scenarios –it’s not chess- but for the sake of argument lets take the arsenal game.
You have Capoue on the ball in our own half with paulinho and dembele 10 foot in front of him either way, the fullbacks sitting deep having just got back into position following an attack and the forward 3 in advanced positions with one winger out wide and another sitting further in. Capoues first move is to pass to either paulinho or dembele who will carry the ball until they’re pressured and they will then release the other one. In theory the fullbacks should now be pushing up, with the wingers stretching the play so that the fullbacks have plenty of space to move into and receive the ball.
But the problem is by this point dembele, as the advanced midfielder, is usually either under pressure by a defensive midfielder with a back 4 fairly close so he tends to pass back. If that isn’t enough to make him pass back straight away (it usually is at that point on the pitch, but lets say it isn’t) , they close off the angles and he’s put under pressure by a centre back (who isn’t afraid of leaving his position to pressure dembele at this point as there’s no way he’ll get through himself or pass through, and even if he did his final product is poor he’s unlikely to play in the marked Soldado regardless of the position he takes up).
So rather than play a one two with Soldado or a winger, pass into the fullback to combine with a winger, he turns and passes back to paulinho, who is then put under pressure and we’ve lost an momentum. That’s the key, if you pressure Dembele (or paulinho/capoue/sandro) effectively in the final third you’ve not only taken away his ability to shoot but you’ve also taken our other 3 offensive players out of the game, regardless of their movement, because he doesn’t have the ability to pick out a pass while under pressure like that. He might do it a few times a season but 99 times out of a hundred, nope.
With Eriksen (or holtby) the centerback can’t have the same confidence; he’s much more skilful than dembele but crucially he is a lot more aware of the state of play and has the ability to pick out a pass from far, far more situations. That’s dangerous for the defense because suddenly they have to actually worry about our marked offensive players, as well his own ability to score.
If you don’t pressure him from a couple of angles he will have time on the ball in front of their box, and he will pick out a pass (you’ve got 2 fast wingers dragging fullbacks all over the place, you can’t be giving him angles for through balls) or shoot, and given enough opportunities to do that we’ll score. So naturally the centreback will move up to support the midfielder, close off his forward passes and Soldado takes that space.
The centreback continues marking Soldado but the wingers at this point are also making runs (tracked by the fullbacks of course, you have one on one marking), then paulinho and fullbacks are also coming in from deep. Either their defensive midfielder moves up to occupy paulino (leaving Eriksen 1v1 with their cb – do they really want to do that?) or they bring someone in from their flanks (leaving their flanks overloaded). If they fail to do that the onrushing paulinho is unmarked for a layoff while all their defence is occupied. The beauty of a proper 433 is that there are so many opportunities to overload their defense.
This is assuming, of course that the opposition isn’t playing an ultra defensive formation; it’s hard to overload teams with 11 men behind the ball. But stick 11 men behind the ball and what unlocks them? Drawing fouls to get free kicks on the edge of the box, long range strikes after moving the ball around to get space, lofted, incisive passing; on all these things a proper AM is more effective than Dembele, who for all his ability is just not that dangerous a player. He’ll keep you possession all day and he breaks up opposition moves in advanced positions well, but he won’t lead to goals; Eriksen and his ilk will – it’s exactly what Bale did for us so many times last season and why he scored so many goals, it’s also why Hulk scored so many for Porto. Sustained pressure with 3 or 4 players who can score if you give them a moment of space means sitting in your own box is a risky business, it's exhausting to hold out like that for 90 minutes and we'll start to open teams up. Then obviously once you’ve scored the opposition has to come out and you get back to the earlier situation.
The thing is, i've had enough conversations with you about similar things to think you must know this, so i'm surprised you're not more optimistic about having more attacking options. You also know that’s just minor examples to prove a point, so you'll probably be able to pick holes in any number of points up there because they’re very, very rough examples to make a fairly simple point - that having a dangerous player in your team will force the opponents to react and think differently to having another offensively limited player; making the opposition react and think is how you create mistakes to capitalise on, how you manipulate their own formation is how you create opportunities and not least of all how you actually get enough skill on the pitch to create and score.
To put it another way if **** had been playing a defensive midfielder (if they had one…) instead of Carzola would we have pushed up our defence to pressure him and left space for Walcott to run into so often? Would he have actually been able to pick out their runners if we did leave space? If Walcott was injured and they’d played someone slower would we have worried about playing a highline, or would verts have pushed right up, matching their 4 (carzola moved infield) and overloading their flanks and defense?
Players attributes are what cause defences to come out of position, and they’re also what give you the quality to score. Eriksen has the right attributes for that compared to dembele, just like when we’re playing away at City I’m pretty sure we’ll need Dembele’s attributes over eriksens.
The last thing you need as well as the attributes of the players is for them to learn where their team mates will be, that’s something no amount of signings can fix and something we need patience for. I’ve made this comparison so many times now but look at Liverpool in the first and second halves of last season, that’s the difference that time can give you and I fully expect us to see the same over the next 6, 12 and 18 months.
Right, that was far, far too long to say ‘attacking players make you more dangerous when you’re attacking than defensive ones do’…
