Thing was watching city v spurs yesterday, formation goes out the window. The way they keep the ball is just brilliant. No one stands still after making a pass, unless it’s to stand still in space to be an option for the return. There’s a way to play possession football and have to give guardiola props for coaching that style into the players. It means when they go 1-0 or 2-0 up they keep the ball out of the opposition hands and higher up the pitch and control the game. Something that we did severely lack under klopp.
Pulling trent inside, although not the worst thing in the world was the first sign I thought klopp had run out of ideas. It was so obviously copied from city it was painful. It's not a bad tactic, but only if you've got the rest of the team to make it work. You've got to press massively high up (we dont) you've got to have two wide players (we don't have that either), you've got to have at least one defender who is incredibly rapid (nope) I can see what we wanted, but it took more from the team than it gave
But don’t forget we did it back end of last year after a **** season and suddenly won 9 of the last 10 and almost got CL football? So it worked then and has worked most of this season
Like I say its not a bad tactic, I can more than see the point if it, but I'm not sure its the best tactic fir the current team.
I'll be honest. What city are doing makes some sense with 4 cbs but they focus on having width from the attackers. What we did was pull the lw (diaz) to a central spot and salah allowed to go anywhere at times so one of the 3 cms have to go wide. If they don't then the side has absolutely zero width and makes no sense. But the biggest thing for me is trent playing in a cb slot makes sense with cb at rb just filling in as an option to pass to but trent at 6 facing the wrong way makes zero sense with us having less options wide to pass to so it's actually really easy to close down with a box formation of two forwards and two cms. Atlanta destroyed us by doing this but other sides in the bottom half of the prem have made it really hard for us by playing 2 up.
