by CityFanFromRome » Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:57 pm
I don't know if Mancini will learn from his mistakes; one would think that he may have spotted some of those before January already and acted in the transfer window to rectify them; one glaring mistake is the absence of any pace in the team; if you look at any other top team in Europe, everyone has pace of some sort, excluding AC Milan maybe. Even them, though have Pato and if you can set him with a through ball, the opposition is done for.
Another mistake is the absence of a creator in midfield. Silva plays too high on the pitch to do that role, so either we employ him closer to the halfway line, or he's not the answer. Mancini likes to play a three-man midfield, then we need a partnership of this kind to make it work: destroyer-passer-creator; we have the destroyer in De Jong, possibly the creator in Silva if we move him slightly closer to the midfield, but we lack the passer. Barry and Yaya should be good enough to fill those boots but in most games they aren't, or in Yaya's case they tire too early. Milner is another possibility, but so far we have not used him there in the middle of the park.
As for the attack, if we play with one up front then it's not necessarily Tevez. We could use Dzeko there, in games we want to rest Carlos, but we could also move Carlos on the left wing, and have him cut inside to unleash his right foot shoot or set Dzeko up. He likes to come back to get the ball anyway, this way we would always have someone upfront to whom we can pass the ball and then run forward to pick up the return ball into space.
The problem in this setup comes on the right wing; can SWP and Milner be the answer? I think they can't in the long run; SWP gives the ball away too easily, Milner is too slow. But till the end of the season they might do well enough there.
Basically, to end this long post, I think Mancini's biggest mistake from january onwards is that he's trying too much to include Dzeko and that brings him to mix two setups which should instead reamain separated; the sort of 4-1-2-2-1 Barca style that we played before January (but with players not good enough/in wrong positions to actually execute it with top quality) and the 4-1-2-1-2 he used at Inter. He should choose which one he thinks suits best the team and go with it, not mix them by just adding Dzeko upfront, as the two styles of play are very different from each other.
