What happens when you take out the games where we had Allen at LB and / or a CB playing at wide right (Hernandez or White)?
From memory + whatever I could cobble together from nycfc.com and whoscored.com in the time I was guiltily stealing from "more productive activities":
So that gives us an average of 51.3% with "regular fullbacks" and 43.7% with "inverted / non-fullbacks". It's a small dataset but lines up with my observations / intuition that we are making way too many simple technical errors trying to play out of the back, which kills any attempt to control the game through possession.
- 49% vs. Philly - we had regular fullbacks but switched to a 5-3-2 and gave up midfield in the 64th minute to protect our lead. Would be interested to see what possession was like before we decided to park the bus.
- 49% vs. Seattle - we had regular fullbacks but switched to 5 in the back again in the 77th minute.
- 44% vs. Red Bulls - first time we saw the "inverted backline" with RJ at LB and Hernandez at RB.
- 56% vs. New England - oh hai, we have regular fullbacks again.
- 33% vs. Sporting KC - Vieira asks RJ to put on 2 left boots again and Hernandez is Hernandez at RB.
- 54% vs. Montreal - wait, is that real? Anyway, we play narrow in D again (this time with White).
As a side note – what are your favorite sources for stats? ^That was painful.
WhoScored and FourFourTwo both use Opta for their stats and are the two best IMHO:
http://www.fourfourtwo.com/statszone/