They used extremely high line to push the opponent to be deep not to do pressing to force the defenders make mistakes. It uses less because their purpose are primary to take total control of the game with passing and movement, the Barcelona tiki taka back then would rather have very high percentage on the ball than off the ball.
Erik ten Hag | 2022/23 & 2023/24
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Nope, as soon as ball is lost, there is intense pressing for about 5 seconds to attempt to win it back. The goal is to have the ball as much as possible and completely choke off the opponent.
Much better without Wout, hopefully his last start as a player for us last week.
Turned OT into a fortress again. Away form needs improved next season for a title challenge. It’s quite nice to have teams go into their shell at our place again.
Agree, and that cannot be done instantly. Some players will be moved on no doubt.
But maybe not as many as you think.
Nope. High press is only just became popular in the modern day of football due to teams playing from the back. The Barcelona tiki taka wouldn’t be able to do high press in the first place if the opponents don’t even try to play from the back. There was very little amount of teams play from the back back in the day for Barcelona to do lot of amount of high press hence why I said they did less high press. The famous Barcelona tiki taka was designed to be on the ball patiently find an opportunity by relying on passing and move.
Oh I know, we've just given one of the biggest culprits a new contract for the next 4 seasons.
Yes. But I‘m sure he is working on it.
We badly need a striker. Our GD is abysmal and that may well count for a lot at season's end.
Once we get a top striker and a ball playing midfielder we'll tear this league up.We're not to far away.
We’re 9th for goals scored but Rashford has half of those goals so certainly another 20+ goal player would help. The main reason for our awful GD is those hammerings we got from Brentford, City, and Pool, though. That’s the main sort of shite EtH needs to strip out of the team.
I see people writing this and I do have to wonder.
What chances exactly would 'a striker' have scored today?
We have two wingers that love shooting (Rashford and Antony) that create next to nothing for others and then we have Sancho who's afraid of contact like a popsicle next to ancient Vesuvius.
I guess maybe I don’t remember him doing all that often at Ajax but now I am noticing, and maybe it’s something that just irks me as ifs been passed down from Jose to Ole to ETH, is bringing on a third cb with 5-10 min to go. Just inviting unnecessary pressure on you and turns the team’s mindset into defend rather than control.
Personally think our GD isn’t just based on a striker (although that’s a big part) but also in our final third execution and decision making. Today is a great example of that.
Oh and it also doesn’t help that we’ve shipped 17 of our goals allowed in just 3 games. That skews it as well
Yes, it's all part and parcel of it but having a leader up front might just concentrate the focus of those providing the ammo for goals.
A striker is part of creating those chances though? With his hold up play, link up, runs etc. Just with Martial you can see how much better we play. Imagine an in form no.9 linking the attack. With a proper CM behind him.
I think there’s a clear different between home and away displays even in terms of performances and our ability to produce his bluebrint. At home nearly all season we’ve been suffocating teams, playing on the front foot, implementing a high press / octane style, using short quick passing interchanges and usually bagging a win. It’s away from home where teams come at us and we then struggle to handle the press, end up getting pushed deeper, panic with desperate flicks / turnovers, and essentially start looking like a team that has just been put together.
The solution is what everyone has I suppose already mentioned in the improvements in personnel but it’s heartening to see that at home we are playing a style of football (which is a work in progress) that is the direction we’d (I’d l) want to head in.
The solution is what everyone has I suppose already mentioned in the improvements in personnel but it’s heartening to see that at home we are playing a style of football (which is a work in progress) that is the direction we’d (I’d l) want to head in.
What are you talking about. As soon as they lost the ball they started pressing like mad men. Rewatch the champions league final against us. When in possession they try to keep it as long as possible and if they lose the ball they were supposed to win it back within in 7 seconds.
We were a team that didn't press. I remember everyone of our players just jogging along and watching them play. Not even trying to win the ball back.
Good strikers get in good positions to make receiving a pass for a chance easier. They make it easier for the creators. They create their own chances too.
Looking at a team and the chances they created and thinking you just need a better finisher to convert more of them is 100% of the time the wrong way to look at it. You get a better striker who has a track record of racking up high xG, and they will pop up in the right positions more often which leads to more goals. So yeah, a game where we dominate the territory and hover around their box, it's like a top striker would have scored 1 or 2, if not certainly have gotten us more clear chances through his own ability or knowing where to move and when to move.
I never say they didn't press. There is difference between pressing and high pressing. Pressing is pressing. What I was talking about was high pressing, high pressing is pressing a zonal defending mechanism in football that teams use to win possession of the ball near or inside the final/attacking third. Barcelona tiki taka back then applied their pressing when the ball was on the midfield area where they structured their team to be more compact in the midfield area. So as soon as the opposition team have the ball in midfield, Barcelona forwards joined in to create compact structure and press the opposition players in midfield area quickly. When they won the ball, that's when they dictate the possession.
We’ll see much better performances aswell when we have our 2 main midfielders back. The quality that Casemiro and eriksen bring us can not be replaced within our current midfielders. They don’t have the same quality. Which is why our performances have dropped massively. When Casemiro is playing we don’t need Bruno to keep coming deep like he has been doing, he can stay further up and do what he’s best at which is creating chance and eriksen when back playing can create from deep.
We are going to have Casemiro, Eriksen and Martial back at the same time 
A striker who is more creative & can bring the wider inverted forwards in to play but can also score himself, rather than a striker who just score through creativity of others.
Examples - Martial, Kane and Kolo Muani.
For example- today’s Rashford’s goal can be scored by most strikers but we also saw Rashford’s dribbling through the left trying to create chances all by himself.
Agree. For example, the dreaded Rome final see us us not very far in term of possession stats from them. We had a competent ball playing defensive line in their prime, so Barcelona was more cautious about us being able to cut through them if they overcommit using a high press.
Our defenders, and VdS had plenty of possession in that game. Barcelona didn't try high press to win the ball up in the pitch. They're more about pressing when we tried to progress the ball in our midfield. The purpose is to rush our decisions, and force mistakes so they can regain possession, slow the tempo down, pass to find opening/create overload in some area.
It's different from Klopp's gengen pressing that tries to win the ball as soon as possible, as well as launching counter as soon as possible even without number advantage.
Nice post.
Less massive tonkings might have helped our GD as much as a striker. Have to find a way to stop these meltdowns.
Please don't try to rewrite history to support your argument mate. I'd bet you didn't even watch that prime Barca playing. For years teams tried all sort of tactics against them and still got fecked. I don't think all the best coaches in Europe, including SAF were that stupid to not realise simply going long would solve the whole issue.
For teams that use long balls they have Pique and Puyol who are extremely fast, strong and excellent in the air to deal with. Busquet what a dirty cnut but he's also very decent in the air. And if he couldn't win the duel he'd fool the shit out of his opponents.
You should buy and give this a read I think.
https://www.amazon.com/FC-Barcelona-Tactical-Analysis-Defending/dp/0956675247
Yes.
Again, I never say they don't press high. They just do it less amount of times which I had mentioned this like 3 or 4 times in this thread because back in the day teams do not play from the back like these days. How can you press high if the opposition team don't play from the back?? Think that first and feel free to answer.
I don't see Messi and Neymar would do high press. Pedro would be the only one in attack to do it.
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I don't blame him. 1-0 up, a must win and they were throwing players forward. It didn't quiet feel like the nervous hanging on for dear life days under Ole, we seemed to get the ball up their end more after the change.
You are right though, we need to control the game better in these situations and kill the game off with possession. The trouble is when you have players like McTominay on the pitch who can't pass at the best of times this just isn't going to happen.
Out of the last 15 seasons or so, ETH's Ajax sides had like 4 of the top 10 best scoring seasons in the Eredivisie. Including the best goal scoring season. So relative to other Ajax managers, PSV managers, etc... he was comfortably the best in the last 15 years. It could go further back too. I just stopped looking at other seasons, hence why I only said 15 years.
Rashford played better than Wout be we were only "much better" because the opponent was poor and not even trying to put pressure on us.
We scored with first big chance and got away with a win. I think people are getting carried away, it's a good result from an average game vs poor opponent.
Seemed to me that the 10 minutes before the Lindelof sub were far dodger than the period after he came on. It was a comfortable finish
Brentford are no mugs.
Just like (almost) any other team in EPL. They did play poorly yesterday and were very defensive, that made it quite easy for the midfield. I just don't think this is any kind of turning point or a proof that Bruno deeper, Sabitzer almost like #10 etc is an effective setup.
Brentford had lost only 1 game in their last 16 matches before last night. That includes a win at the Etihad and a draw at Arsenal.
Can we stop calling them a poor team. They are anything but a poor team if you know anything about football.
Can we stop calling them a poor team. They are anything but a poor team if you know anything about football.
All the usual suspects that were infesting this thread since Sunday, have gone missing. Strange, that
The set up was better, and no Weg helped, but I think people are right around the lack of intensity, except in a reactive sense, by Brentford. Without Cas and Eriksen, it's a higher reward than risk strategy to just press and press against us, particularly with De Gea, Varane without clearly open passing channel, McT often playing as link midfielder. You can foresee constant turnovers, even against weaker sides, if they have the requisite set up and mentality.
McT was slightly better at driving with the ball and taking it up, but it was still fairly average by most PL midfield standards, and it was symptomatic of him to waste what was not an especially difficult ball (at least at the standards we should expect from all midfielders at a club this big) on the break which would have put - I think - Martial through at the end . It should be fairly straightforward to upgrade on press-resistance, even if it's for a supplementary rather than starting midfielder, if we sell him, VDB and a couple more of the squad players to funds to invest in addition to those already (presumably) allocated for the new CF and planned long-term Cas/Eriksen replacement/stand-in
McT was slightly better at driving with the ball and taking it up, but it was still fairly average by most PL midfield standards, and it was symptomatic of him to waste what was not an especially difficult ball (at least at the standards we should expect from all midfielders at a club this big) on the break which would have put - I think - Martial through at the end . It should be fairly straightforward to upgrade on press-resistance, even if it's for a supplementary rather than starting midfielder, if we sell him, VDB and a couple more of the squad players to funds to invest in addition to those already (presumably) allocated for the new CF and planned long-term Cas/Eriksen replacement/stand-in
They are not a poor team, but they did setup defensively yesterday. We can argue if this was because they feared McTominay and Sabitzer bombing forward, Antony dribbling and Sancho speeding past fullback, but that was the case yesterday.
We had a decent game but I still think we look very weak in this midfield setup.
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