With all respect,
NYCFC_Dan - I think there was a lot to discuss. I enjoyed the discussion I had with
SebastianBlue in the shoutbox before it got shut down. And yeah, I know I'm trying to drown my misery in walls of text and reason.
I'm gonna sidestep the discussion (like so many Giovinco shimmies
) on Pirlo because it's frankly kind of boring and I don't think we are going to come to any new conclusions by talking about it on the Internet. We are seeing different things and it's hard to illustrate what we see in text, asynchronously. Would still be down to talk through his game play-by-play over beers, though.
Overall, I think it's pretty clear that this is a systems / tactics failure more than a personnel failure but I think most of the dialogue has been about individual performances.
We had our "ideal midfield" (with Herrera) against TFC on July 20 and I thought we saw a lot of the same shortcomings. TFC are very happy giving up possession. A 4-3-3 tries to space people around the pitch pretty evenly. A 3-5-2 puts a lot of people in one line and tries to get that line in the right part of the pitch. Since we like to play patiently, we give TFC a ton of time to put that line in the right part of the pitch. When we turn over the ball, we give up really good chances for them to score.
We began to see glimmers of "getting it" at the beginning of the second half. When we turned over the ball, we tried to counter quickly while TFC were out of position and carved out some decent chances. But it's really clear that we're not well-drilled to do this. Villa rolls off the CBs too late. Our second-wave of attack comes too late. We are drilled to control possession and slowly get our players into position to expose overloads out wide. When we can't do that, we flounder.
I would feel more confident about our season if we can develop a second system that gets us ready to bunker and counter against teams like TFC. I think we need 2 up front to do this, but am open to
SebastianBlue idea that we can still do this with 1. I just think that with 4-5-1 in defense, it's hard for our midfield line to support Villa quickly enough for us to retain possession. Ironically, the way we played Chicago after going down to 10 men is a decent blueprint for this. I was hopeful that we'd use that against TFC from the beginning of the game but sadly we stuck to our plan A too rigidly.
I also hope that the rest of MLS wises up so they can start taking more points off TFC. I haven't watched a lot of them outside of games against us, but I suspect they aren't used to teams give up possession against them and and they let their fullbacks drift up the field, leaving them open to the counter. It would almost be better if they started getting found out closer to the end of the season so they don't have time to work out a new system for the play-offs.
