Much better.
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boy did we need that
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Villa played in to our hands fortunately. We do better against teams that try to play out from the back. That allows us to trigger our pressing.
Go long and winning the second balls with long ass throw ins is not what Emery’s trying to do and that’s what unravelled us for the last 4 league games…
Hopefully that lifts the mood but there are still a good number of answers to find to get back to where we were and do it consistently
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Weekend not ruined.
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Much better performance and it will have pissed off a lot of fans and pundits all over the country.
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Phew! What a fabulous score😍
We are okay for now. We gladly teed off alot people who thought we were down and out.
What a huge booster.
Well done Redmen!
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No, in other matches teams went over any press so getting the press right was rather irrelevant and would also have players out of position and why we would lose 2nd balls.
I probably remember matches differently where Isak and Wirtz and Gakpo got play through and Chiesa running like a madman (with a mad touch)… all with the ball still on the ground.
Anyway, sure Villa made us look good, let’s move on and try to look as good against Real (though I’m afraid it’ll be a repeat of the Chelsea match).
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It’s not a binary thing. Even though we’ve clearly been subjected to a lot of direct football this year, you could make an extensive failure real of us this season getting played through. The fact we’ve been struggling, regardless of how teams have wanted to play against us is a mark of how little has clicked this year
Second, there is nothing about pressing that should leave you particularly exposed to losing second balls after they’ve pumped it long. If the opposition have players far enough up the pitch to go and pick up those balls, then our player who is supposed to be responsible for them had no business being caught up the pitch anyway. If the player isn’t there to receive the ball, then we’ve got nothing in that area of the pitch for that player to press into. This pattern we’ve seen is just far more simply whatever it is we’ve been trying to do doing it poorly. Very often it has been a case of pressing with more players than we should’ve had given how slow we were to get affective pressure on the ball, giving the opposition the time to get their head up and pick the right ball forward and then not doing the work to get back on the right side of the ball once they’ve pumped it
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That was the end of the Chelsea game and we are undone not by the forwards press but by not supporting from the midfield and defenders.
Similar happened at the beginning of this game for their 1st attack we had 4 on 3 at the back with Grav being one of the 4 and left a player open in midfield where Grav should have been pressing. That is down to Slot’s plus 1 ideology at the back.
And the hoof ball got a hot fix of playing two more combative midfielders in Szobo and Jones as a double pivot (after Macca’s failed header that led to the ManU’s goal). To me it feels like the game plan still gets figured out match by match, which isn’t good at all as team moving forward.
Regarding second balls, worse is that we lost it when we weren’t pressing (leads to being dominated and late goals after scoring). And when we pressed high, typically we got caught by having 2 midfielders and a full back up high, with all passing channels to those midfielders blocked, then lose the ball high, fail to get it back (pressing problem, right?), then one long ball creating the aforementioned 4vs3 or 3vs2.
I’ve mentioned before in how we press under Arne with 4 players an the way teams are beting it is by a player either full back or forward dropping in the space behind them and with us wanting plus 1 at the back we are putting pressure on that player, hence why we are easier to play through.
I also, think Klopp press was also to focus play so we could then trap a play are make the opposition go down Cul de sac’s, whereas there doesn’t seem to be direction in Arne’s press.
Regarding long balls, again I have mentioned it isn’t always winning the 2nd ball that is important to the opposition, it is that they trap the player who gets on the 2nd ball and are then able to win the ball and then have numbers to attack with.
Lastly, and I know you agree with this is that we actually are quite poor when playing against an organised press and end up coughing up long balls which the opposition win and then start the process again.