Foot & Soccer Soccer Match Reports, Football News
Formation graphics dominate a lot of thinking about how we view our teams, tactically. I think most Arsenal fans would view the team as playing in a 433 and that isn’t incorrect. I think a large number of supporters also appreciate that formations are fluid and look different in and out of possession. Sometimes your thinking changes a lot when you ‘flip the graphic’ as it were.
Personally, I don’t really view Arsenal as playing in a 433. I think the key to the evolutions of Arteta’s team become clearer when you start thinking about the setup as a box midfield, with two deeper lying players and two more offensive players ahead of them in parallel. While it is true that Arsenal play with three principal midfielders, they always have a player who leaves their ‘formation graphic’ post to form a quartet.
Arsenal essentially have dual 6s and dual advanced 8s and it can fan out into more of a diamond shape in possession. Last season, that was achieved by Zinchenko moving into a left six position with either Partey or Jorginho off to the right of him. Ahead of them they had Xhaka as a left eight and Odegaard as a right eight. That meant that the midfield box looked like this.
It is fair to say supporter patience has been tested with Zinchenko this season. Supporters rarely feel comfortable seeing a member of the defence moving into midfield anyway, much in the same way we will never quite come to terms with a goalkeeper who ‘baits the press.’ It makes us stressed and we are not elite athletes like the players are, we are wired to resist that level of risk.
However, it would be dishonest of me to hand wave the fact that the risk reward dial in Zinchenko’s performances had drifted too close to the ‘risk’ side. The damaging home defeat to Aston Villa was his last start of the season and while I think a lot of this is due to some tactical redundancy, which I will cover in a minute, even as something of a Zinchenko apologist, his edge of the box…
Source link : https://arseblog.com/2024/05/boxing-clever/
Author : Tim Stillman
Publish date : 2024-05-30 12:00:49
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