Brighton & Hove Albion 1-1 West Ham Utd (17/08/19)

[the pink palermo]

The defensive shape on the goal is awful.

Diop and Ogbonna are not in line which is why Murray has a 5-10 yard start behind Diop; it's also why he makes a hash of a basic piece of defending. He's coming at the ball from the wrong starting point.

Our defensive shape was awful, period.

No discipline ( in terms of alignment), no leadership......no Balbuena.Thats the clue.

Watching other teams, including Brighton, all weekend, each of them had far, far better shape in terms of a back 4, 3 yard gap, and then another 3 or 4 midfielders in front of them.

Everyone esle was defending, by and large, as a unit, we on the other hand looked like a bunch of strangers slung together 5 minutes before kick off.

Brighton could have had 4 or 5 goals, a better team would have.

[hammerman11]

There are a couple of points I would make regarding our defence and shape.
1. we never seem to have a settled defence or team due to injuries, far more it seems than other teams.
2. our back line is all over the place and plaers are constantly out of position and trying to recover their position during other teams attacks.
3. lack of urgency of our midfielders in getting back. They tend to jog rather than run hard back to support.
4. lack of fitness of our midfield who seem slower than most teams.

Obviously noble returns when fit but some of the above points apply to him as well. we really do need a new athletic CM.

[prophet:marginal]

It may not be settled, but Fredericks-Balbuena-Diop-Masuaku were each available on Saturday.

I actually rate Ogbonna, truth told, and think he gets much more criticism than he really deserves.

But, if he had done enough to warrant a starting place, it oughtn't to have led to Balbuena getting dropped.

[BethnalGreenHammer74]

I wrote a few pages back about whether Pellegrini would think about getting a defensive coach in?
I like Fredricks, Diop and Balbuena, but put them together and something isn’t right. There shape and positioning is all over the place.
Maybe someone like Rio Ferdinand or someone who could work on our shape/organisation defensively.

[hammerleroy]

Surely Pelligrini has been around long enough to organise his defence? No?

[hammerman11]

fredericks diop Balbuena masuaka are the frst choice back 4 for me.

Johnson cardosa ogbonna cresswell next up

zabaleta as cover but is too slow. how would he have dealt with brighton`s pace on Saturday ?

[Crouchend_Hammer]

Rice has gone across to the left where we lose a series of challenges, Masuaku being the exception, before they lump the ball forward. Our central midfield is nowhere to be seen as Trossard runs in behind them.

.

This is one of the problems though. If Rice is playing as the only defensive minded midfielder he needs to stay in position. I don't know if it is managerial instructions to chase the ball or him losing discipline but there is no need for him to be where he was. He should be patrolling the area in front of the back four, especially given the state of the game at that point. It was the same v Man city. He was pressing far too high up the pitch.
I would consider brining in sanchez against Watford and having him play the deep role giving Rice more licence to play a bit further forward, which I think he is suited to as he can carry the ball and also make tackles higher up the pitch

[hammerman11]

saNCHEZ IS TOO SLOW TO START A GAME DOUCOURE AND CAPOUE WILL DESTRY HIM !

[sanchoz]

[YorksHammer]

I thought we were decent without being great on Saturday - a bit sloppy in possession, ropey at the back at times, but an improvement over how we played against Man City.

What I'm really struggling with is why these things are happening in the first couple of games of the season - they look like issues that would be apparent, and sorted out, in pre-season. What did we do for the two months before August?

Lanzini was MotM on either side, in my opinion, and probably the difference between us losing 1-0 and drawing 1-1. Masuaku had an excellent game at left back, too, and showed why he should be number one there. Thought Yarmolenko looked neat and tidy when he came on, too.

Where we struggled, for me, was with the two wingers - Fornals and Snodgrass just did not keep the ball enough with their passing, partly due to trying to cross it in to someone who very unlikely to win an aerial duel - and also Rice, who had a poor passing game. I think/hope it's a one off - he's normally much better than that - but he regularly gave the ball away.

It's a point against a team on a high from last weekend and with a new manager bounce, and a style of play that will trouble other teams. Brighton will finish in a similar position to us this season, I suspect - they are much improved, front to back.

Something to build on into next weekend, against a Watford side who have been in poor form for ~6 months now.

[Crouchend_Hammer]

saNCHEZ IS TOO SLOW TO START A GAME DOUCOURE AND CAPOUE WILL DESTRY HIM !

we don't need him to run 100m in 10 seconds
All he needs to do is sit in front of the back four, fill the space, break up play and track any runners
The simple fact is he is the only player we have who has experience of that role, so may as well play him

[Turns to Stone]

the most dangerous player on the field is the one with the ball...

coaching 101

In my coaching manual, there is some fine print under that line which reads...

Unless the player with the ball is Carlos Sanchez

[NW5hammer]

Surely Pelligrini has been around long enough to organise his defence? No?

This is the bit I find generally puzzling. I am not looking for the return of BFS or even Hodgson's robot-coaching but most PL teams have much better shape without the ball.
We don't seem to have trained for the basics.
Take one example. Why did we play it long from Fab when we had no target man? We lost the ball to them every time he kicked out. We are a possession team and yet we gave away possession from our keeper every time (I think almost literally). Why was there no simple plan in place to play out from the back?

[Patito]

In my coaching manual, there is some fine print under that line which reads...

Unless the player with the ball is Carlos Sanchez

In which case he'd be the most dangerous player to ourselves.

[Pulls up Trees]

Diop doesn't play well with Ogbonna. Not sure if it's a trust thing, or if it's just that he has to play right sided CB.

Did Balbuena and Ogbonna ever play together last season?

[hammer1975]

Posted on another thread.

I don’t think Copa America did us any favours with regard to Balbuena (or ACON with Masuaku). Missed most of our pre-season, barely played in the actual tournament. Probably not match sharp and being taken out of the firing line by the manager to have time to build up. Balbuena looked rusty against Man City imo. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him start his season properly against Norwich.

[Absolutely Hammered!]

Anyone else think fredricks looks terrified on the ball and very unsure about what to do when in possession which leads to big mistskes. Then we have masuaku who if anything is over confident in his ability and tries to play street football to get out of trouble when he should just go long at times. Polar opposite full backs.

[Graza]

Having seen the various highlights packages I'm happy with the point. I thought it would be a score draw before the game so it's nice I got it right too, even if I did plump for 2-2.

I don't know why anyone is annoyed about the offside goal not given, the guy was offside when the free kick was played, no one touched the ball before him, there's no case to answer IMO and a good use of VAR.

The goal we scored was one of 3 really good chances crafted by Lanzini. It also showed the sort of play that would allow us to make use of Hernandez. I'm glad he's fit again and I think he'll justify the confidence many have in him.

The goal we conceded was yet more schoolboy defending. If we want to win games this needs addressing. I'm not convinced this is a personnel problem, it looks like coaching to me, they don't hold shape, they don't seem to know who should be where and the decision making suffers. If this goes on much longer then the next most important signing we could make would be a new defensive coach to try and take some of that away.

I thought we had a strong penalty shout that I'm stunned VAR didn't give it to us, the guy makes contact outside the box Antonio is ignoring it and going through on goal and he lifts his leg to just clip him. If we'd got that and scored the penalty it wouldn't have been a just result - the draw was fair I think - but I wouldn't have given a flying one.

[Albie Beck]

I thought we had a strong penalty shout that I'm stunned VAR didn't give it to us, the guy makes contact outside the box Antonio is ignoring it and going through on goal and he lifts his leg to just clip him.

This.
I thought that this was exactly the situation that VAR was supposed to identify - the little movement that was too quick or subtle for the ref to have identified, or was hidden from his line of sight.

Total fail.

[Smonnie]

Pellegrini got the team selection all wrong.

I can't for the life of me understand why we played Balbuena over Ogbonna.

I also can't understand why we are chopping and changing our left back already - pick a man and back him.

A settled back four is key to defensive stability, and we have swapped out 50% of it already.

We were nowhere near physical enough. Fornals and Lanzini, whilst talented and skillful players, are powderpuff, and with Wilshere and Snodgrass supplementing them, we lacked height against a team that, despite their 'new playing style', won the league last year for fouls committed.

Given that we also had Hernandez up front, we were always going to struggle to dominate midfield.

I said all of this before the game, so it's not 20/20 hindsight - we should have started with Antonio and Yarmolenko in place of Fornals and Lanzini, if we wanted to play Chicharito.

After a full pre-season where we got most of our business done early, I'd expect a manager of Pellegrini's manager to make less naive team selections.