Fosu-Mens
Full Member
Those Pogba/Martial/Shaw links are baked into our lopsided system and would be frittered away if the right side didn't function the way it does now.
We're a tiki taka team up our left flank and a counter-attacking team up our right flank. The drifting 'right winger' is a big part of that. Lingard and Mata have great movement and excellent ball retention stats. That's the reason they're there. They free up space on the right side the pitch where we're deliberately trying to create space. On the left, we're deliberatly trying to make things congested because of how technical Pogba/Martial/Shaw are. It's about forcing the other team to play to our strengths on each flank.
As a result of the above, our build-up is skewed up towards the left. But our attacks in the final third are actually split about even between the left/right, thanks to the right sided drifting of the CF and the overlapping of the RB (notice that, by contrast, the LB is not asked to do as much overlapping).
Being unbablanced is not a bad thing. We won both our last two CLs playing that way.
If you took Lingard/Mata out, it would have the knock-on effect of weakening the left... unless we replaced Lingard/Mata with a 'right sided AM' who was at similarly good at recycling the ball and finding pockets of space between opposition CB and DM. Incidentally, that's not Sanchez/Rashford/Martial's game, which is why none of those three have been played on the right.
Agree, but this right sided AM should be better on the ball than Lingard, and able to hold his own on defense unlike Mata.
The expensive options for this type of players are; Dybala and to some degree Sancho and Zaniolo.
The medium prized option: Fekir.
The cheap options are: Suso and Sarabia.