Definitely not the beautiful game we were starting to play earlier in the year. We are playing completely different than the possession football from earlier in the year. We used to link from back to front, and now it is lump it up to DV and jack and hope for the best.
RJ is and always has been much worse on the left, I hope forcing Mata out there with an injury won't haunt us. Excited to see what Chanot can bring, but will suck to break up the CB pairing again. Saunders stop of Drogba's FK was awesome, hands down. Credit to Saunders, he seems like a great guy, great teammate, and I have no idea about the details on that Shipp goal, but even if it was deflected, it wasn't deflected very much, so he wasn't in position for the ball in the first place.
Road win, I love it, but I remain concerned that a formation with no link to a CM is unsustainable. Villa is dropping deep to receive the ball in the position that our CM should be. Here's the avg player positions:
View attachment 5334
I think it shows in that we don't have the flow and resulting possession we were developing. The formation ends up as a 424, and we are dropping very deep when the opposing defense has the ball, we've given up any semblance of a press.
In the first 15 games of the season, with Mix or Lopez at CM, we had an average of 56% possession (58% if you remove the outliers of the Portland and TO games with Mix AND Lopez and Mix/Poku as CMs) In the past 6 games, we've had 47% posession (50% if you take out the outlier of the KC game) that is somewhere between a 11% to 6% drop depending on which numbers you like.
We are also creating 4.5 fewer shots per game in the past six games (15.5-11.1)
My conclusion is that if you love Frank's unconventional goals, that is fine, but we need to pull a player from somewhere else to link the back 6 to the front three. Frank should be a recessed forward or a very advanced CAM, with a CM behind him.
Viewfrom226 true talk about the winger play. 
