Niall Quinns Discopants wrote:Twobob wrote:Niall Quinns Discopants wrote:Plan bzzzzzzZZZZZZZzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzZZZZZzzz
What a fucking age old cliche. His "plan B" worked pretty well against QPR didn't it? When people start to go against manager it's always the fucking "plan B" card that gets thrown in. Generally what I assume most people mean by it is that when we are behind, manager does something to change the game plan. To react to ongoing situation. I thought overall Mancini did pretty well in that department. He often changed formations early in the game if it wasn't working out. Thing is that when there's 20 minutes left on the clock and you are behind, the odds are already against you no matter what you do. Mancini did pretty good job fighting those odds usually.
His realy shortcoming was the idiotic experiments with wingback system.
What caught people out is that at first he generally tried to plug the hole that was causing us to lose, often bringing a defensive minded mid on - that queued the 'We're # down and he's doing what?!' comments, but once he'd shored it up a little then he'd bring on more attacking players. Then he started trying to get too complicated and use that Wingback system and it all went to shite in a basket.
That's exactly how I saw it as well. We were usually losing the control of the game so he brought in someone to take control again and then, usually after five or ten minutes when we had gained control again he'd bring in attacker. He just wasn't one of those managers who brings in three guys at the same time and change the whole game plan at once. Bring them in one at the time so you don't have half the team bedding to the game. I thought that was generally pretty good approach.
The wingback thing was jus horrible and I will never know what he was thinking with it.
In other words he sometimes lacked the bottle to make the kind of changes neccessary to change the game, preferring to play safe first each time & when he did decide on a plan, it was sometimes the wrong one, which is prettty much what we've just said.
The plan B system everyone was talking about was for the games where we just kept running down the middle trying to thread passes through the centre of a ten man defence & getting nowhere. People wanted to see width. Not wingbacks; proper wide players giving the defence a new problem to deal with. We had one basic wide move, play it to the corner of the box, wait for Silva to play a dummy inside then he instead turned it round the corner & Richards, Zabba, Milner overlapped & put the ball accross the box.
We took the rags to the cleaners with it & the whole Premier League was shocked to the core. So they worked on stopping it & pretty much succeeded straight away. So instead, you get players running at the fullbacks & going outside & give them a whole new problem to worry about right ? Then they will forget to stop the original plan ? Nope, we just carried on doing the same thing over & over & were still doing it the day he left. The wingback system ended up relying on the very same pass round the corner that teams had already sussed before we used it, but now they could catch us out easier when we lost the ball.
It was uninspired. Bob should have done better & used the talent at his disposal to find another, most likely much simpler, way.
I don't know for sure if Pellegrini is going to implement a successful plan B or whether he will just have us banging our heads against a brick wall as well, in which case he will most likely be gone by this time next year, but his first two signings are both players who are good at exploiting exactly that kind of plan.
