A Case for the Defence

[redblood]

Without Agger a lot of hoofing and I mean a lot. That means that we must first win the ball back and then try and create something against a packed defense. You almost never see a quick counter attack from us.

With Agger we don't hoof anywhere near as much and that means that we can attack against a less organized defense and that means more space to work with.

I would agree with that statement our play out of defence hasn't been nearly as good, also with Alonso missing we have not passed the ball as well as normal.
2 big players to miss and unfortunately one from one our weakest areas of the pitch the CB position.

[badpiggy]

I think our two biggest problems at the mo are a complete lack of confidence and absolutely ZERO, and I'll say that again for dramatic effect, ZERO, movement off the ball, nothing, nada, nowt, non, zilch!!!

i definitely agree with the lack of movement off the ball thing. and it's interesting to see that lots of people now say we are boring, negative, predictable etc...

2 points:

1. those sceptical of rafa have been saying this for ages. (cheapish shot but some posters have been constantly slated for this). i still haven't seen an actual technical critique of what rafa has done in one individual game that explains exactly what his gameplan was. my own suspicion/fear is that the amount of technical knowledge and technical preparation just doesn't seem to add up to a winning plan consistently in the premiership. we go to ****in derby/boro/wherever and our first thought is how to negate them... and it doesn't work.

2. with the rigidity inherent to rafa's football philosophy, i'm not sure he encourages much movement off the ball - he seems to like a grid sliding up and down the pitch with the only movement off the ball being us hounding the opposition we they have it.

[Charlie_B]

Nothing is going right at the moment, let's be honest!! Exception being Torres. Not a doom monger by any stretch, but the ONLY positive is Torres' form and goalscoring. Get the defence playing well, or key attacking players playing well, or 17 goals in 4 games or whatever it was, we'd be fine. Our problem at the moment is the fact we have so many problems at the moment...

[Morph]

ah well, looks like there's no chance of testing this theory any time soon now