Originally posted by Irishnev
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If you look at the EPL, pressing hard as a team is not really that unusual a concept. Spurs do it, Bournemouth do it, City will do it and so on.
So teams who come up against it on a regular basis will figure out ways to counter it and unless you have some really brilliant players who can either unlock defences or grind out results against defensive teams, then you get to see what happens to the likes of us and Spurs when a team parks the bus.
We seem to lack the ability to change the direction from which our attack will come from once a team goes into it's shell. Sometimes we get passed the block due to how good our front three are, but when they get blocked we simply do not have attacks coming from deep on a regular basis that would force the team sitting deep to push players out to block those runs and in the process create room for our attackers.
Keita is a step in the right direction to fixing this problem, as his direct style and dribbling abilities will force teams to come out to try and stop him, but if our other midifeld options stay the same then the usual risk of being hit on the counter through our soft centre remains.
For me we need another quality CM, one that is more disciplined than Keita whilst still beingmobile and it needs to be one that can read play/break up play/get the ball to the attackers.
Someone like Saul would be ideal in terms of style of play. For that role. He can sit deep and shild a back line , but in more open games he roams and positions himself so that he can tackle/intercept or simply just cut off areas from having the ball passed into them.
Get someone like Fekir to play ahead of Keita in that set up and we get a player that can play in the AM role who is both creative and an attacking threat, and he and Firmino could interchange at will.
Would probably cost the entire Coutinho fee to get those two, but I would see our team as being far stronger than when we had Coutinho in it and it would be a team that looked balanced imo and able to both soak up pressure and also attack from deep

He's far too inconsistent, he is capable of bossing a game, but we rarely see it happen.

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