The College Dropout

Yes but Pep does it because it reduces space for opposition. We give opposition acres of space in rest defence.

Aye but you can close gaps between the lines in that formation. That’s my only point. And you can move to it from other formation.

Man City defend in a 442 often.

A normal 442 defence protects that gap well. Or any 2 banks or 4 really.

Maybe I’m wrong. But it looks like we setup the same way tactically or close to it every game. Like today I think we tried to go 1v1 in the press. But it didn’t work. After that nothing. When teams play with 2 10’s we do the aggressive CB thing which works when we are pressing. But in ‘rest defence’ opposition pop it through the lines again and again. Howe does nothing about it.

The investment is in line with 7th. Everyone else has spent money too. i look at this squad and I don’t think it’s a top 4 squad. Not top 6. I said this after Villa. There’s so much joy for opposition to be had between our midfield and defence. Foden punished us. Liverpool punished us. Joao Pedro punished us. We need to change it tactically.

Spent 70m on fullbacks. No meaningful minutes for any of them thus far. Massive drop off at CB with one injury as was the obvious risk. No creative outlet going forward.

Fine? We’ve been outplayed the entire half.

Ferguson always has players near him. Isak is isolated.

Brighton are playing Brighton ball and we look confused.

We are so easy to overload in central areas.

Lola like ours goes to press 1v1 and they just do us with slickness.

We need a different approach man.

They are clapping our cheeks. Midfield doesn’t know what to do. Defence at sea. No threat. My gosh this is bad.

1 down. We’ve been so bad.

It’s mad.

With an obligation. I mean a proper loan as a short term measure to fill a gap.

Sometimes you need to pad out the squad. Like how Villa have signed Lenglet or Zaniolo(sp?) or Brighton with Fati. Or Man U and their left back. But we seem happy to go with Murphy and Lascelles and co. so let’s go.

Ekitikite helping us out.

They wanted another creative player. Failed with Kudus. Got someone else on loan. We don’t seem to want to plug gaps in the squad with loans.

Bankrolled Chelsea and Liverpool. I pray we finish above them again, I don’t want to hear anything about Saudi money. It’s likely to be closer to £225m right? Thankfully for us… Liverpool’s owners are normal business men interested in making operational profits in the short term as well as profits in the long term. They’ll spend the Saudi money alright but they won’t push the FFP max at all. They’ll spend the £225m maybe even a little less to soften the CL loss. It’s only Villa and Chelsea (and us) doing the ‘let’s try and spend everything we can to succeed’ strategy.

Deserved a call up man. Fucking Southgate.

I think the small squad might work in our favour (although we are far too light at CB). Small knit group. Everyone should get minutes bar one or two. Howe doesn’t seem to like much rotation anyway.

Oh brother.

We had an awful squad pre takeover. So our net spend is going to be very high. We have no assets to sell. We’ve still got 5-6 senior players who cannot be sold.