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Team shape, tactics and personnel


MaVilla

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1 hour ago, tomav84 said:

i think unai would put barkley in that role, worst case. not as good as tielemans, but i'd imagine he's the one he'd turn to in that situation

I don't think Barkley has the mobility or creativity for it personally, I think he's really well suited nowadays to the sitting role where he can set things off but not have to chase after them. We have options of course, like McGinn and Barkley and Ramsey, but none of them seem a perfect fit - we were perhaps a little spoiled last season in having two players of the calibre of Tielemans and Luiz.

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I know it's early days but we're 5 games into the season and our xGA has improved a lot from where we were in the final 20 PL games of last season. We were averaging 1.9 xGA and that climbed to a 10 game average peak of 2 xGA. Now we've only had one game where our xGA was greater than 1 and that was West Ham (2.3) where the penalty was 0.79 and the final double chance in 90+7 was 0.8. So that was open play xGA of 0.71 if we exclude the dodgy penalty up until the chance at the end.

So it seems our defensive performance has improved so far this season

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5 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

I think one thing that for me stood out last night was that we're short in parts of midfield and incredibly reliant on Youri Tielemans. 

Last season, we'd have had Tielemans in that line up, making us tick and progressing the ball through the lines, starting off attacks and controlling things.

Tielemans has been excellent this season and he's a very good player, he's very effectively replacing Doug in our first team - the problem we have is that we've replaced Doug with Tielemans, but we haven't replace Tielemans with anyone.

We kind of have three tiers of midfielders - the deep ones, the middle ones and the forward ones and in terms of depth at the moment, it's a bit unbalanced.

Deep/Defensive

  • Onana
  • Kamara
  • Barkley
  • Bogarde

Central

  • Tielemans
  • Maybe Mcginn

Forward

  • Ramsey
  • Rogers
  • McGinn
  • Buendia
  • All the wingers

There's a lot of talk about the missing body at the back, especially with Diego Carlos potentially out, but if anything happens to Youri Tielemans, I think we're in real trouble.

 

I do think both Barkley and McGinn will fit that position when needed, less so RB just because of his age. At the minute I feel like John is being used as a very very good utility player, but I also think Unai has a 'proper' role for him, and right now he's taking one for the team.

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5 hours ago, OutByEaster? said:

I think one thing that for me stood out last night was that we're short in parts of midfield and incredibly reliant on Youri Tielemans. 

Last season, we'd have had Tielemans in that line up, making us tick and progressing the ball through the lines, starting off attacks and controlling things.

Tielemans has been excellent this season and he's a very good player, he's very effectively replacing Doug in our first team - the problem we have is that we've replaced Doug with Tielemans, but we haven't replace Tielemans with anyone.

We kind of have three tiers of midfielders - the deep ones, the middle ones and the forward ones and in terms of depth at the moment, it's a bit unbalanced.

Deep/Defensive

  • Onana
  • Kamara
  • Barkley
  • Bogarde

Central

  • Tielemans
  • Maybe Mcginn

Forward

  • Ramsey
  • Rogers
  • McGinn
  • Buendia
  • All the wingers

There's a lot of talk about the missing body at the back, especially with Diego Carlos potentially out, but if anything happens to Youri Tielemans, I think we're in real trouble.

 

I do think both Barkley and McGinn will fit that position when needed, less so RB just because of his age. At the minute I feel like John is being used as a very very good utility player, but I also think Unai has a 'proper' role for him, and right now he's taking one for the team.

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image.thumb.png.5081ecb2d16987087d7fa6f88711b15e.png

 

This is our rolling 10  game xG and xGA under Emery. The steep increase in xGA from point 35 is when Kamara gets injured against United and it climbs up to xGA of 2 until steeply falling because of this season. This may be because Emery has ditched the extreme high line offside trap and tweaked our defensive set up. Also we had injury crisis at end of last season. You can easily see our end of season slump there with xGA gap to xG very wide and this seasons underlying performances showing a rapid reversal. We are at 1.7xG and 1 xGA over the first 5 games of the season

 

Edited by CVByrne
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