The 3-5-2

[Dameerto]

It worked today because spuds are a Mediocre team at best, who pretend to be good. It also worked because we were already dominating possession and they couldn't get through. Try it against a half decent team and it will flop just as it has done all season.

If Mancini wants to play high possession games like Barcelona, he needs to get some better central midfielders, instead of holding ones gaz slow baz.

You mean like when we used it in the community shield WIN against Chelsea? Don't let facts get in the way of a biased opinion.

[Im_Spartacus]

You mean like when we used it in the community shield WIN against Chelsea? Don't let facts get in the way of a biased opinion.

Or the come backs in the cup against sporting, porto, united etc

[Swales4ever]

It worked today because spuds are a Mediocre team at best, who pretend to be good. It also worked because we were already dominating possession and they couldn't get through. Try it against a half decent team and it will flop just as it has done all season.

If Mancini wants to play high possession games like Barcelona, he needs to get some better central midfielders, instead of holding ones gaz slow baz.

"Fergiesnose" Supporter of: Manchester city.... mmhhh

let me bring You some light in the darkness:
1) Mancini do not just "wants to play high possession games", he DOES, since 15 months.
Even Rat face, on today live commentary, could not miss to say: "City always dominate their game with massive possesion, they have the most shots on goal of any other side in the league: contrary to last season they are less accurate"
2) Mancini always aims to improve Mancity, either by a) adding new tactical competence, each and every season and b) agreeing with the Club the purchase of the very few who can add further quality to a side of already immense quality.

As per point 2a) he just failed to consider that this was the worst summer to introduce new competence when all the top players could not attend the pre-season training camp. He stuck with his stubborn program and got so struggle to make it. It will come effective by practising it along the weeks (when not bound to play 3 games in it).
Only few numpties who just refuse to come and say "I was wrong in thinking that he was a caretaker" do prefer and insist talking of Sci-Fi, like Mancini want to bottle games: one day is because he panics, another because he wants to outfox opponent manager, then there is my favourite fantasy football Sci.Fi: Soriano and Berguistein were hired not to fill blank key roles, but on mission to start Mancini's countdown. Priceless.

As per point 2b) where's Mancini fault if the sporting director refuse or is unable to place a substantial bid on DeRossi for 60 days. just to be forced to rush it in the last 2 days of the window, when the Chairman had been forced to intervene.
where's Mancini fault if the sporting director let Hazard slip away from Manchester after being here to see Cheshire estate and waste time until Chelsea won the CL? and so on, back to the previous summer window.
Now the bluff had been called and we finally have a senior spoting director, along with a senior CEO and a senior football manager.

These are facts, others are just Sci-Fi or speculations by Rags.

[Ted Hughes]

It worked today because spuds are a Mediocre team at best, who pretend to be good. It also worked because we were already dominating possession and they couldn't get through. Try it against a half decent team and it will flop just as it has done all season.

If Mancini wants to play high possession games like Barcelona, he needs to get some better central midfielders, instead of holding ones gaz slow baz.

I agree with most of what you are saying, but I don't see the system itself as the reason for failure, just our ability to play it & picking the right time to use it. Mostly, Mancini has picked totally the wrong moment to use it & it's actually made us worse rather than better, but against dinosaur Ferguson last season, & clueless AVB this season, it worked almost perfectly.

The system Mancini has been using sometimes is not really a 3-5-2 though, almost more of a 3 1 2 4 or a 3 1 6 & that's where the shit really hits the fan if teams are brave enough to go at us rather than sit back. Spurs allowed Yaya to take the ball, turn & run into 40 yards of space, whilst all our players ran forward & their defence had no idea who to mark. Utd last season just went to pieces with geriatric Scholes not knowing what to do. Ajax though never even blinked, just steamed straight through the middle of us, as did Aston Villa & when we tried part of that system, pushing players up v Dortmund & Arsenal even with a back 4, they just filled the centre of midfield & took the piss out of us. Yaya turning back under pressure because we had only Dortmund players in the centre, led to Rodwell giving the ball away near our goal.

Had Spurs been any good, they could have done the same, but they are shit & the ideal kind of team to use it against.

I have no doubt that the system can work in the future, though not all the time. Just have to be very very careful when to use it or practice it, & for the most part, Bob has got that wrong so far.

Strange after all this time to be going back to a Kevin Keegan tactic though. I bet he's having a little chuckle to himself after all the shit he got for using it.

[Sweden]

.........................Hart............................
...........Zaba......Kompany......Nastasic............
..Maicon..................................Kolarov.....
..............Yaya.............Barry...................
.......Silva..............................Aguero.......
....................Dzeko..............................

[Swales4ever]

amazing Sci-Fi. gets better every day.

entertaining

[Slim]

.........................Hart............................
...........Zaba......Kompany......Nastasic............
..Maicon..................................Kolarov.....
..............Yaya.............Barry...................
.......Silva..............................Aguero.......
....................Dzeko..............................

Well that wasn't what we played at all.

[Swales4ever]

.........................Hart............................
...........Zaba......Kompany......Nastasic............
..Maicon..................................Kolarov.....
..............Yaya.............Barry...................
.......Silva..............................Aguero.......
....................Dzeko..............................

Well that wasn't what we played at all.

in fact that looks like 3-4-3 which is a completely different story, and God may take us away from that.

[Slim]

It was fun to see it work though, maybe next season, 3-4-3! Oh how we'd get murdered on the flanks.

[Ted Hughes]

It was fun to see it work though, maybe next season, 3-4-3! Oh how we'd get murdered on the flanks.

The real downfall of Keegan's 3-5-2 system often started down the flanks but this system looks fairly strong there but weak straight down the middle.

[john@staustell]

Maicon is the key. Someone forgot to tell Mancini he was injured for 2 months though!

[london blue 2]

Talking Tactics: How Mancini made changes to sink Spurs
In his regular BBC Sport column on football tactics, Robbie Savage takes a closer look at Manchester City's 2-1 win over Tottenham.

City boss Roberto Mancini has been given a lot of stick this season for making what people have seen as unnecessary changes to his formation.

But his tactical tinkering, with his system and with his personnel, was the key to City's comeback from 1-0 down to beat Spurs.

Maicon came off the bench in the second half as City switched from a back four to a three-man defence and another substitute, Edin Dzeko, was the man to score their last-gasp winner.

MAICON MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
At most of the teams I played for in my career, we usually had one basic formation which we stuck to - no matter what other changes were made during games - because the manager was limited by what he had on the bench.


Maicon previously struggled against Gareth Bale for Inter, but excelled on Sunday for City
At City, Mancini can be more radical than most because of the quality and variety of players at his disposal.

But he still has to be brave to make sweeping changes to try to alter the direction of games, because they can backfire.

The most bizarre change I have experienced during a game came when I was playing for Wales in a friendly against Leyton Orient in 1996 and the manager Bobby Gould decided to move our centre-back Chris Coleman, who is of course now in charge of Wales himself, out onto the left wing.

It was a warm-up game before we played San Marino in a World Cup qualifier and Bobby must have thought they had a small full-back because our game-plan changed and we started hitting diagonal balls out to Coleman.

It did not work too well. We ended up losing 2-1 to Orient, who were then a Division Three side (the division now known as League Two), and reverted to a flat back four against San Marino with the experiment definitely over!

Clearly Mancini has not tried anything as outlandish as that in his time with City and, for all the criticism he has been getting, he has not actually played anybody out of position.

Even so, you still feared the worst for City on Sunday when Maicon came on after 56 minutes. There must have been plenty of people waiting to leap on to Mancini's back again.

The Brazilian was taken to the cleaners by Gareth Bale when he was playing for Inter against Tottenham in 2010, and I saw him struggle badly as an orthodox right-back against Cristiano Ronaldo when Real Madrid beat City in September.

So you can understand why Spurs fans cheered Maicon's introduction, and Bale must have been thinking the same. Instead, his arrival proved a masterstroke.

Up until he came on, City were playing a variation of Mancini's favoured 4-2-3-1 formation and were finding it difficult to break Tottenham down.

Usually when you play that formation you look for your full-backs to get forward but Pablo Zabaleta and Gael Clichy had got super-tight to Bale and Aaron Lennon to nullify Spurs' main attacking threat.

Zabaleta and Clichy did that exceptionally well and it meant that, with Emmanuel Adebayor on his own up front, the only way Spurs looked like scoring was from a set-piece, which unfortunately for City is exactly what they did.

But the two sets of wide men cancelling each other out also played into Tottenham's hands because it meant that, apart from a couple of decent runs down the right by Zabaleta, when City did come forward early on then it was mostly through the middle.

Tom Huddlestone and Sandro were soaking everything up in that area for Spurs, particularly Sandro who was mopping everything up, covering runs and making good tackles.

So City were dominating possession but not doing anything with it because they were very narrow. That changed when Maicon came on and they switched to a 3-5-2 formation, and he was the man who made the difference in the game.

It was a gamble because it really opened the game up and gave Spurs more of a foothold in midfield too. There was more space for Bale and Lennon in the final third and City were no longer seeing most of the ball.

But, crucially for City, they also had an injection of pace down the right and the boot was on the other foot with Bale, who was not giving Jan Vertonghen enough help in dealing with Maicon, allowing the City player to run at him and put balls into the box.

Maicon's performance was an example of how a player can struggle at full-back in a four-man defence but can be a revelation when he is released as a wing-back as one of the five men across the middle.

The tweak to City's midfield freed Yaya Toure up to make darting runs forward too and have a much bigger influence on the game.

And with Kolarov also high up the pitch on the left, City were able to get wide and behind the Spurs defence, which for some reason continued to try to hold a line high up the pitch and was soon exposed by Sergio Aguero's equaliser.

SUPER SUB DZEKO DELIVERS AGAIN
Maicon was not the only inspired substitution by Roberto Mancini at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday.

Dzeko may not like being known as a super-sub but his manager and team-mates definitely won't mind seeing him come on to score vital goals like his late winner.

During my time at Blackburn, we had our own player in Matt Derbyshire who scored quite a few goals for us when he came off the bench.

He was clever and had a bit of pace and sharpness about him and, even though he was only a young kid at the time, we used to see him coming on when we were behind and struggling in games and think 'we've got a chance here'.


Edin Dzeko and Javier Hernandez are excelling off the bench for their Manchester clubs
It was a big lift and it is the same for City with Dzeko and Manchester United with Javier Hernandez.

I am not comparing Derbyshire to those two players in terms of their ability, just in the way that by offering something different to the people they replace, they always seem to make an impact.

Derbyshire had Craig Bellamy, Roque Santa Cruz and Benni McCarthy ahead of him so he knew that as a young lad he would not get the opportunity to start many games and he had to take his chance when he came on.

But he did not have the same effect when he started games for Rovers and, similarly, it will be tricky for Hernandez or Dzeko to displace Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie or Carlos Tevez and Sergio Aguero in their respective starting line-ups.

That is why it is difficult to lose the tag of 'super sub'.

You cannot see either Dzeko or Hernandez getting a run of five or six starts to build their confidence because of the other players their clubs have available in their positions and their reputation of changing games from the bench counts against them because their manager knows that it works.

MORE TO COME FROM MANCINI AND CITY
The worrying thing for the rest of the Premier League is that City have not really got going yet, and they are still unbeaten and have the meanest defence in the top flight.


Roberto Mancini's switch to a 3-5-2 formation was pivotal against Tottenham
For me, the most dangerous they have looked in any game so far this season is in the second half against Spurs when they had changed to a 3-5-2.

I do not think Mancini is going to suddenly start with that formation in every game, or even change to it mid-match, but it was the first sign that he is succeeding in terms of where he wants to take City.

For most of the campaign so far, they have had very little momentum but I think the players will take a lot of heart from that result and how they got it, and their manager will too. Imagine what they will be playing like when they find some real form.

Robbie Savage was talking to BBC Sport's Chris Bevan

[Swales4ever]

It was fun to see it work though, maybe next season, 3-4-3! Oh how we'd get murdered on the flanks.

The real downfall of Keegan's 3-5-2 system often started down the flanks but this system looks fairly strong there but weak straight down the middle.

Also it's clear, or it should be, that the system is an optional one, to be used as plan B to counter certain oppositions' qualities either from the start or by switching along the game.
If for nothing else, for the fact that Mancini benchmark style is the passing and moving game, emphasized and balanced at the same time, by 4-2-3-1 formation, as proved by the purchase of certain kind of players in first place.

[PALUS]

Iwill use this only on teams like who come to defend and when we losing , last time worked perfect , but u must add Silva is there and when hes there it s all bether

[Bluedays]

Is this tactic good against teams without actual wingers like us ? I'm not exactly a tactical genius but it make sense as it floods the midfield and adds width? Just a suggestion