Sketching out formations in the snow

Well, it's very cold out, so perhaps some pie-in-the-sky dreaming about formations is called for.

The Guardian recently had an interesting (if long-winded and somewhat wankful) article on 4-2-3-1, a formation which is gaining popularity in Europe and helps to explain Spain's recent successes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2008/dec/18/4231-442-tactics-jonathan-wilson

This kind of formation might pay off for us. We don't have the strong box-to-box midfielders (Gerrard is the prototype; in MLS, someone like Kljestan or De Rosario) that will cover a lot of ground and link the defense and attack through sheer skill and work rate. So perhaps the solution is to break the trip up the field into shorter chunks by playing in four levels, instead of three. Each layer of the team has less of the field to cover and the natural tendency is to play higher.

We need to find ways to accentuate Blanco's strengths in playmaking, conserve his strength over the season and mask his weaknesses in defense. One way to do that is to allow him to build on the platform of two strong defensive midfielders and not bear so much responsibility for tracking back. Using Thorrington and Pause in these roles helps them build off each other's strengths. Pause can concentrate on being more of a pure destroyer and leave the holding role to Thor, who can get farther up into the attack when needed. This is what I am trying to suggest by staggering them in the diagram below.

Another way this helps us is that it helps to get Rolfe and Mapp or Pappa into the attack more directly. Instead of having to bring the ball forward from the wings for which none of them are particularly well-suited, they're in better position to make runs off of Blanco and McBride. This quote from the article sums it up. "It was the most symmetrical way I could find of playing with four forwards."

The glaring weakness of this formation is width, both in attack and defense. Attack doesn't bother me as much because the Fire have not often played that kind of cross-heavy game in the past. However, this scheme would be vulnerable both to snipers like Beckham and O'Brien and speedy fullbacks who can get forward like Wynne and Sean Franklin.

Overall, this formation helps to solve some glaring weaknesses in last year's side. It provides a good setting for Blanco and McBride to play their best game as they slow down by reducing the amount of running they have to do and surrounding them with the players who can support them. It also gets our best eleven players on the field playing in positions suited to their skill sets without trying to hammer square pegs in round holes (cf. Rolfe at RM, Pause as a distributor and our rotating cast of second forwards, none of whom worked well with McBride and Blanco).

----------- McBride ------------

-- Mapp/Pappa ------ Rolfe -----
------------ Blanco ------------

------------- Thorrington -------
---- Pause ---------------------

-- Segares ------ Prideaux/Robinson
----- Soumare --- Conde/Brown -

------------ Busch -------------