Is Stendels way of playing. Its why we hired him. To implement this. A lower division Pep or Klopp. The difference is both those clubs get to sign players who on a whole suit the system not because the scout on football manager suggests they have potential to improve in future. I cannot for the life in me understand why we signed Chaplin. A player who wasnt even a first team starter for Coventry last season. Weve no spare legs in midfield hence playing Sibbick. Styles isnt trusted. So why is he not out on loan? We've got Jordan Williams, a right midfielder having to player left back. Our second choice leftback is half fit and half blind. Weve two wingers whove any pace yet lack a final ball. Another whos built like a ball and a further winger who has even less end product than the others. Weve one striker and a kid who appears to have won a contract from the back of a cornflake box given the minutes hes getting. You dont have to go and spend tens of millions to be competative in this league. Neither Luton or Charlton have. A few shrewd signings to bolster their exisiting squads or replace 'like for like' when a players sold. The whole plan of buy polish and sell works. Its a very good methodology and will keep the club in the long term, Solvent. However, its not Stendels pressing game that needs to change. Its the Plan with the recruitment and player turnovers.
Seems like our high press is easily countered by long balls over the top. Wycombe did it at their place to good effect last season, and the Brentford manager and players mentioned it after the game. Redders said you can't keep it up for as long as we try to, and that you need to have lulls when you keep the ball, but that comes with experience and better players. If the high press is our only way of bridging the gap in quality in this division, then we're really struggling.
Frankly, it is simply not right that when a coach has been saddled with players that do not suit his style, he continues to play the same style anyway. It would be a miracle if we had changed 12 players during the summer, and had found that all 12 players exactly corresponded to the coach's criteria. It just never happens, even when the picking is being done by the self-same guy who will be doing the coaching. The coach has his squad, and there is nothing that can be done to improve that squad until January, so lets just stop looking back in an attempt to apportion blame, and start looking forward to the remedial steps that can be taken to get us some points between now and January. The coach seems to have done nothing towards that goal. He simply continues to play new players in the same system, and complain about them when it does not work. Again, that is not enough from a coach who claims to know the game, but plays in just one way. He has to find a way to play that suits the talents of this crop of players better than his first choice system does, otherwise, we are relegated already. I will tell you what the problem is. The system that Stendel is playing works perfectly well when his players are better individually the the opposition. That is why it worked perfectly well last season, our players were better than those in opposition teams for the majority of the time. It was never going to be the same this season, whether we had kept the same players or not. You simply cannot have better players when your opponents are spending double or triple what we are spending. The coach simply has to recognise the different circumstances and plan accordingly. I mean, it is not even as if we have a settled squad. Yes, we should be stronger in at least 3 positions, and the recruitment team and club management could perhaps have done better, but Stendel should also be doing better. No-one is going to hire a coach who is limited to just one idea.
The problem when you have lesser quality players, combined with very very young players, it takes time to teach them. It then takes time for the teachings to become conscious decisions they make and recognise themselves and ultimately just become habit and the norm. If you look at the teams of Klopp and Guardiola, despite spending huge sums of money on very very gifted players, in their first seasons they each got beaten a fair bit, often to fast counters where the press had failed or triggered at the wrong point. The press can be successful, at present we have a lot of new players who may be aware of how it works, have tried it a few times, but this is the first time many are playing it in practice and against this calibre of opponent. The key are the lulls as outlined. Changing the pace of the game and just eating up time to recharge our batteries and tire the opponent. There will be many subtleties that we are less likely to pick up, and the obvious issue that young and new players won't necessarily be doing what they have been told to do. I feel for Stendel because this team feels a long way from what his basic expectation would be. I'm not sure what tinkering will suddenly transform our results. When we've been less dynamic, we've looked awful and toothless, when we've had a go, we've been picked off. We need time to gain experience, until we can loan or buy some... though I doubt we will and by that time, we may have the mother of all gaps to bridge.
This team reminds me of Southampton under Nigel Adkins when they first got promoted back to the Premier League. Very pleasing on the eye but little substance. It took a managerial change for them and a back to basics approach for them to stay up. I know this is the Championship but the gulf in class is the same now from League 1 to the Championship as it is from the Championship to the Premiership. It's getting wider all the time. If Stendel persists with these tactics and we keep getting beat then he'll get the pedlar nowt no surer.
Hecky's response to this conundrum was to go more defensive and sooner or later it will be Daniel's due to the resources he has been given to work with. I don't know the answer to all this, and fans will have to decide whether they are content to see us alternate between being flat track bullies in League One and whipping boys in the Championship.
Just on the subject of Klopp, i was watching a programme that stated (and interviewed the coach) that Liverpool have scored more set piece goals than anyone else (they also invested in a throw in coach!). I know this has been discussed before but also when you gave inferior players to everyone else, wouldn't it be a decent idea to try capitalise on our free kicks and corners, a bit more? We havent looked a threat for 2 years on corners....and the Mersey lot arent doing too bad are they?
With every Mowatt you need a Perkins, Scowen, Dawson, Burns or Mitch Ward type player in there. We're badly missing that type of player. There has to be somebody in that mould available on a free.
With american owners I'd have thought we'd have brought in something like that already. A defence coach etc.
I strongly believe as soon as we go defensive we're doomed, I've no problem with tightening up a little but Heckingbottom played for 0-0s and got 0-1s and that's what will happen here.
We havent the players to attempt to try and play any other way. There isnt a player in the squad who can play with their back to goal hold the ball up and bring others into play. There isnt the nous in the squad to play a containing counter attacking game, organise, when to pressure etc. We'll be down by Christmas as I dont think we'll win more than 3 games between now and then.
I said at the start of the season that one of the key areas that would mean if we survived or dropped would be how we dealt with set pieces at each end of the pitch. I was pretty pleased to see height being brought in with Halme, Mads, Sibbick and Diaby, but then surprised we went and sold Moore without any replacement. We have to work on set pieces. We just have to. If we can stay tighter in games, even if we're keeping the ball for 70% going nowhere, then having small bursts of high intensity that catch teams cold, get some free kicks and corners and look to get some quality going. I like Mowatt, but unless he's shooting at goal, we need someone else taking the delivery and getting them to practice hours and hours to hone it. Once we can get some accuracy and certainty, player movement can be improved because they know where the ball is actually going to be. If we don't improve on set pieces, I strongly believe we'll go down.
Yes. We have plenty of height in the team, but no end product from corners and free kicks. I'm sure with coaching Cavare could put a long throw in two.
I think Schmidt could be good at getting on the end of set pieces despite his height. His half chance in the second half against Brentford when he flicked it towards goal reminded me of Sam Winnall and he wasn't a tall guy either.
I agree. Surely that is something relatively simple to do. Just one goal from a set piece e every now and then woujd be something.
Should he be doing better with the players at his disposal? Looking at what he's been given to work with I'm no so sure. What's the alternative? We go 4-5-1 (really negative) and try and nick a goal and then defined for our lives. What if we do this and concede an early goal? That plans gone to sh*t already. I don't believe we are good enough at the back to keep clean sheets and we don't havet that big unit up front to hold the ball and bring others in to play. I really hope I'm wrong here and Stendel finds a winning formula fast but I think it's immaterial how we set up, we're not good enough and there ain't anything we can do about it until January.
For me you have to stick to your principles. Changing things mid season and going more defensive wouldn't guarantee any upturn in results. It would also set the development of these players back even further. Agree with @DannyWilsonLovechild thoughts on set plays too, we really need to work on that.
You and others have made the same point. We do not have a centre forward for 4-5-1/4-3-3, and I agree. That leaves a deep 4-4-2 or 3-5-2 from the recognised systems that I know. With a deep 4-4-2, the front 2 tend to get isolated if there is no player to hold the ball until support arrives, so that one is out as well. The only one that we have left is 3-5-2, so by default, I think that we should give that a go. You might think that that is a desperate way to arrive at a solution, but if I remember correctly, we arrived at exactly the same solution once previously under Viv Anderson, and Danny Wilson took us to the Premier League with it. There are 4 tall lads for the back 3, but Sibbick seems our best reader, so he should be in. The wing backs would be two quick players with defensive ability. I have been complaining that the middle 3 are getting outnumbered when our opponents play 4-3-3. 3-5-2 solves that. Up front, we keep 2 players because we do not have a player who can play there on his own. I will say again, it is desperate, but we have to try something else or we drop back to League 1.
Sibbick, Bahre, Raddlinger, Wilkes and Madds were all Stendel signings. The latter was found by the 'Football Manager Scout' first of all though. That same scout that found the players we're all bemoaning were allowed to leave.