Defence or Attack - which is most important

[bigblue]

Saw the top of the page and thought Ted Hughes was posting again! But no, just phips posting on threads from 2015...

[phips]

hey BB, you know right before you click to go into a thread from the "Maine Football forum" there is a little bit of text right below the thread title that tells you when the thread was started, right? it's right below the title. so if you've read the title then you've seen when it was started. not that hard. quit acting like posting a relevant bit of info in a thread devoted to the topic in question is some burden on you.

i also refer you now to the #2 rule of the forum: "2) Check to see if a topic has already been covered in a thread before starting a new one."

[Justified logic]

hey BB, you know right before you click to go into a thread from the "Maine Football forum" there is a little bit of text right below the thread title that tells you when the thread was started, right? it's right below the title. so if you've read the title then you've seen when it was started. not that hard. quit acting like posting a relevant bit of info in a thread devoted to the topic in question is some burden on you.

i also refer you now to the #2 rule of the forum: "2) Check to see if a topic has already been covered in a thread before starting a new one."

Thanks phips. I've learnt something today.

[iwasthere2012]

hey BB, you know right before you click to go into a thread from the "Maine Football forum" there is a little bit of text right below the thread title that tells you when the thread was started, right? it's right below the title. so if you've read the title then you've seen when it was started. not that hard. quit acting like posting a relevant bit of info in a thread devoted to the topic in question is some burden on you.

i also refer you now to the #2 rule of the forum: "2) Check to see if a topic has already been covered in a thread before starting a new one."

Rules are made to be broken........check out the off topic section.

[ruralblue]

You would be much more suited to Blue moon where the mods are stricter. Stop quoting the rules like a tit when you get off on this sort of thing.

[Mikhail Chigorin]

In response to this revived thread, for my money, attack is far far more important than defence.

Attack is flair and verve, defence is just statistics, but don't ask me to either clarify or defend that claim, because I can't.

[bigblue]

In response to this revived thread, for my money, attack is far far more important than defence.

Attack is flair and verve, defence is just statistics, but don't ask me to either clarify or defend that claim, because I can't.

Pep's philosophy is that a good attack is the best defense and proper defense leads to better attacks. Kinda mucks up the whole distinction.

As someone once said, "Education allows you to see all the shades of gray between black and white"

[CTID Hants]

hey BB, you know right before you click to go into a thread from the "Maine Football forum" there is a little bit of text right below the thread title that tells you when the thread was started, right? it's right below the title. so if you've read the title then you've seen when it was started. not that hard. quit acting like posting a relevant bit of info in a thread devoted to the topic in question is some burden on you.

i also refer you now to the #2 rule of the forum: "2) Check to see if a topic has already been covered in a thread before starting a new one."

Rules are made to be broken........check out the off topic section.

FFS IWT, don't invite the cockwomble in to OT!!

[CTID Hants]

In response to this revived thread, for my money, attack is far far more important than defence.

Attack is flair and verve, defence is just statistics, but don't ask me to either clarify or defend that claim, because I can't.

Agreed MC and I probably wrote something similar back in 2015 in this dredged up thread. I've always been a subscriber to KK's philosophy

[nottsblue]

Also it depends on how much you value entertaining football. Mourinho values winning over everything else for example and his sides have usually not been the most attractive to watch. I for one would be fine with us finishing second or third this year having scored the most goals.

[Mikhail Chigorin]

In response to this revived thread, for my money, attack is far far more important than defence.

Attack is flair and verve, defence is just statistics, but don't ask me to either clarify or defend that claim, because I can't.

Agreed MC and I probably wrote something similar back in 2015 in this dredged up thread. I've always been a subscriber to KK's philosophy

I suppose, as a football fan CTID, it all boils down to whether you'd rather watch a great attacking side (even though the defence might be a bit suspect), or a great defensive side (where the attack tends to have to work very hard to score).

If you can have both (although not to the exclusion, in any way, of the attack), then that's fine but the question was posed as 'which is the more important ??'.

[iwasthere2012]

hey BB, you know right before you click to go into a thread from the "Maine Football forum" there is a little bit of text right below the thread title that tells you when the thread was started, right? it's right below the title. so if you've read the title then you've seen when it was started. not that hard. quit acting like posting a relevant bit of info in a thread devoted to the topic in question is some burden on you.

i also refer you now to the #2 rule of the forum: "2) Check to see if a topic has already been covered in a thread before starting a new one."

Rules are made to be broken........check out the off topic section.

FFS IWT, don't invite the cockwomble in to OT!!

My bad.

[iwasthere2012]

In response to this revived thread, for my money, attack is far far more important than defence.

Attack is flair and verve, defence is just statistics, but don't ask me to either clarify or defend that claim, because I can't.

Agreed MC and I probably wrote something similar back in 2015 in this dredged up thread. I've always been a subscriber to KK's philosophy

I suppose, as a football fan CTID, it all boils down to whether you'd rather watch a great attacking side (even though the defence might be a bit suspect), or a great defensive side (where the attack tends to have to work very hard to score).

If you can have both (although not to the exclusion, in any way, of the attack), then that's fine but the question was posed as 'which is the more important ??'.

A strong midfield that can help both.

There case closed.

[Hazy2]

Seeing Everton, exploiting the space our wing back/full backs vacate again, same as last season. Unless we get top draw central defenders who can defend that. Winning the CL or even the Premier League will be difficult. As KDB has said we take our chances the game is done. Everton 1 clear chance a goal. Top sides,The likes of Napoli will hurt us, unless we sort it out. Get VVD you have the best available to deal with teams counter attacking.

[Dimples]

you will know the answer to this in May.
We attack, the Rags defend.
winning pots is important.
being entertained is important.

if we win the PL then we score on both important issues above and attack defeats defence. The dream scenario.

if the Rags win the Pl then you have the answer to the thread title from a personal perspective. defence beats attack at the expense of entertainment. if you are happy with that then attack is more important. I for one will not be happy with that.

[johnny crossan]

Really this follows on from the Chelsea thread, as the issue was raised about how much of an impact a good defence has on a title challenge. So being a boring cunt, I decided to look at it from a scientific point of view at the start of this thread to potentially add some data into the mix before we all head off on a big argument about whether attack or defence is the biggest predictor of a title win.

I took the premier league champions total points, goals scored, goals against and goal difference from each of the last 10 years, including the projected finish for chelsea this year.

I then ran regression analysis against to compare total number of points to GF, GA and GD to see which ones had a verifiable correlation with the number of points at the end of the season, and the results were far more clear cut than I expected.

Goals for has a 37.7% correlation with the number of points
Goals against has a 65% correlation with the number of points
Goal difference had no correlation (0.8%) with the number of points

In summary, over a 10 year period, defence has been almost twice as important as attack in terms of predicting which teams win the title.
r the defensive pivot.
So with this in mind, it makes both Mancini's and Mourinho's focus on not conceding somewhat more logical, given that I'm fairly sure I'm not the first one to do this and find that a solid defence has a greater bearing on the league title than a prolific attack.

So how would people prefer us to play in light of these trends? I certainly don't advocate the Mourinho style, but does this open up tactical questions about losing Yaya and his goals in favour of a less porous midfield?

It's an intriguing question, if Delph departs as expected (if that is even relevant) we have only Fern & Yaya for the defensive midfield/pivot position. If Fern gets crocked those stats say we could be in trouble. Having said that just watched Brown on TV telling us he played defensive midfield on Monday night! On reflection Danilo could probably do a decent job there too.