Inverted wingers tore up 4-4-2s with overlapping full backs - it's not Pep-ball but Mourinho-ball from early Chelsea days with Duff & Robben. It gets you between the space between the full back and his closed central defender.
Low blocks seems to be the response to inverted wingers, because they come inside, you can sit your defensive line very narrow and leave no space to get through centrally. If a ball does come in, it's an in-swinger which is super easy for a defender to get his head on and get it away.
Wide, traditional wingers seems to look like a natural counter to low blocks, because with two touches you can make room for an out-swinging cross that your entire midfield and forward line can bomb into the box for. For inverted wingers, you've only got two options, through balls in the tight spaces around the edge of the box, or a chip to the far post. You're only targeting one or two players at most with that. A traditional winger can make a chance that 3 or 4 players could feasibly get on the end of out of nowhere. The other benefit of an out-swinger is that the overhits can keep the ball in play, and will often fall to the attacking team as the defending team will have their fullback in the box defender the incoming cross, and our left sided full back or midfielder can pick it up. An overhit in-swinger is a goal kick.
What Murphy brings - and I've mentioned this before in match threads - is that he plays with pace and instinct. I don't mean he runs fast, but that he moves the ball very, very quickly. It seems almost anti-Howe ball. The comparison with Trippier & Almiron is that when we broke, the ball would hit Almiron, who would turn it back to Trippier. The whole opposition defence would get themselves sorted, we'd get ourselves sorted, and we'd camp outside their low block without actually an idea of what our next step would be.
When Murphy started playing in front of Trippier, Trippier took a few games to adjust because Murphy wasn't waiting for an overlap or to cut back - he was spotting the runs, the space and putting that super dangerous early ball in from out wide. It's not Murphy adjusting to playing regularly, it's the team getting used to the speed of thought and action that Murphy brings, we have a much, much more direct threat now in Murphy that we didn't have before and it's a breath of fresh air to see that incisiveness.
It's picking the right tools for the job, but having wingers who can whip outswingers in to dangerous positions is something that a lot of modern defences are going to struggle with. Most of us can remember flying wingers bombing down to the byline like Gillespie, or Neville overlapping and pinging in some peaches, but the lads playing today haven't seen that in their adulthoods and are going to have to learn how to deal with it. They've been coached to defend against the inverted wingers of the past 10 years.
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