West Ham Season Preview 19/20 Part 2: Tactics
The addition of Pablo Fornals to the squad naturally raises the question of just exactly how Manuel Pellegrini intends to fit all of these creative midfielders into the same team. Fortunately, the latter stages of the summer gave an indication of how his team might line-up and how it all might work.
Tactics
The earlier pre-season friendlies were characterised by a continuation of the same shape and personnel as the end of last season: mostly a 4–3–3 with Rice as the sole holding midfielder and two inverted wingers either side of a mobile central striker in Michail Antonio, although there was some experimentation with Felipe Anderson as a false 9 type centre forward. The results and performances were disjointed and poor. That’s to be expected at the start of a summer but it was enough to raise an eyebrow.
After the team returned from China and incorporated the new signings into the mix, things changed, with an alternative system utilised for the final 3 friendlies, perhaps signalling the shape of things to come.
We started the Hertha/Athletic games in a 4–4–2 shape, with Fornals playing as a second striker alongside Haller, and with Lanzini on the left and Felipe Anderson on the right. Although the second striker dropped off the link with the midfield in the early phases of build-up, when the ball was worked out wide, they moved back centrally to provide extra presence in the penalty area, rather than drifting out to combine with the wide players. There’s been a lot of rotation and fluidity between Lanzini/Fornals/Anderson, with Lanzini swapping with Fornals to have spells as the second central forward, and all 3 players taking turns to play from both the left and the right.
The inclusion of extra creative players seems to have had a bit of a knock-on effect on Anderson — he’s been dropping deeper to pick up the ball in order to help us drive forward in transition with his dribbling. As a result, he’s been less involved in the final third in the last couple of games beyond throwing in a few crosses and has spent much less time playing alongside Haller compared to the other two.
Obviously it’s very early days for Haller, but the initial signs are that we’ve not figured out how to create shots for him yet (he scored a header from a free-kick vs Hertha and his only one vs Athletic was a overhead kick off a deflected pass). As previously mentioned, our best attacking moments have come when Haller has moved out wide and helped to create chances for others. He’s looked unselfish with the ball and active out of possession — all of which is a continuation of the way he played for Eintracht Frankfurt last season where Rebic and Jovic both benefited from his selflessness, albeit in a side with a more direct approach to possession. Finding a way to fit Michail Antonio into the side around Haller is going to be vital and will be something that could really pay off, especially in games where we’re predominantly playing on the break.
The key to getting Haller settle will be more to do with West Ham adapting to his game than him adapting to West Ham’s — as beneficial as his selflessness is, we need to find a way to help generate high quality chances for him.
Another feature from the Athletic match that is worth mentioning is the positions Jack Wilshere was taking up. After passing it out wide, Wilshere regularly made runs ahead of the ball and ended up loitering on the edge of the box, leaving the shape resembling effectively a wide diamond. It lead to him scoring, but it leaves us extremely vulnerable on the counter. If he continues to do that, we’ll be ripped to shreds by any team half decent in transition. That’s bad news considering we already looked shaky in behind our full-backs before we started completely abandoning central midfield.
And here’s the crux of the matter. The major problem areas for West Ham are (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) both full-back positions and central midfield.
Ben Johnson started the majority of the pre-season friendlies at RB and generally looked our best player, yet was dropped in favour of Ryan Fredericks for the last game. If Johnson finds himself in a situation where he starts <10 Premier League games this season, the club have failed him. He’d be better off going out on loan if he’s not going to be utilised significantly.
The RB area has been less of a problem than LB, where Aaron Cresswell’s positioning and lack of athleticism were exposed time and again as opposition wide players exploited the space in behind the full-back to create chances from crosses and cut-backs. In fairness to Cresswell though, part of the problem is a lack of pressure on the ball in central areas, which makes it easy for the higher defensive line to be carved apart by through balls.
But it’s not like Cresswell’s ventures forward provided much compensation for his defensive frailties, so Masuaku has to be first choice in that position. Masuaku was bizarrely limited in his forays forward last season, often having to hold his position to make up for Pablo Zabaleta’s misguided attempts to play as a winger. Hopefully with Fredericks’ recovery pace on the opposite flank, Masuaku will be encouraged to unleash his phenomenal ball carrying skills to drag opponents back towards their own goal.
Jack Wilshere has been uniformly praised for his performances in pre-season, something I find baffling. I’m going to try to lay off him for a few games when the season actually starts, but in the interests of nailing my colours to the mast now: Jack Wilshere is a catastrophe of a footballer.
He’s lost any mobility he might have once had and is so sluggish in possession that he causes the game to grind to a halt. The only benefit that he brings to the side is an ability to draw fouls, but most of those only occur because he’s so ponderous with the ball at his feet that opponents have time to close him down and foul him. He was a non-entity with us last season, mediocre at best in a much more talented Arsenal side the year before, and he struggled to get into the Bournemouth team regularly the year before that. It’s been at least 3 seasons since you could point to a full 90 minute match he had a significant positive impact on, and yet the cries of “he’s the best footballer at the club when he’s fit” still ring out. It’s utter shite.
But even if you rate his passing ability much higher than I do, what can’t be denied is that he’s an utter liability defensively. Time and again in pre-season, opposition midfielders sauntered past him and more often than not, Wilshere made little or no effort to track his runner. Even when he did, he was left for dead, grasping at shadows. Any attempt to play him as part of a midfield pair with Rice will end in disaster and the degree of that disaster will only be exacerbated if he continues to make runs ahead of the ball. Starting Noble is still preferable to Wilshere — Nobes is equally a liability out of possession, but he at least knows his limitations.
The squad is crying out for someone in the midfield engine room with the dynamism and athleticism to get around the pitch quickly, someone who can help progress the ball up the pitch out of our defensive third either with incisive passing or strong dribbling. Someone who is capable in the air would be a godsend and if at all possible, this secondary central midfielder should be left-footed to balance the team when we have the ball in midfield. Basically, we should have signed Philip Billing.
The extent of the problems in central midfield were highlighted in the Hertha game, where Rice and Wilshere were replaced by Snodgrass and Sánchez. The two actually combined to create a goal for Grady Diangana (like Johnson, Diangana looked electric in the friendlies and hopefully will get the game time he needs under Slav at WBA) but that was notable for its rarity. It’s a stark reminder of the thinness of a squad that’s had a fortune pumped into it over the last 12 months and it makes the decision to let Edimilson Fernandes go all the more curious — while he’s not left-footed, he fulfils the other criteria required from the other CM role. Giving Fernandes a run for a season surely would’ve been preferable to persisting with Sánchez or extending Snodgrass’ contract for another year.
The issues in central midfield are going to have massive ramifications on the side defensively, but they cause problems in possession too. It has seemed like West Ham are stuck in the same pattern of play from last season, something clearly drilled by the manager: when we have possession in our half, the ball moves from CB > FB > up the line to winger. Winger gets stuck > shifts it inside > 3 passes to switch it across the pitch > try same thing on the opposite side. Gradually inch forward with no idea about how to manufacture chances once we reach the final third.
Interestingly at the weekend, Roberto exclusively took his goal-kicks long in order to seek out Haller quickly, despite the new ruling allowing defensive players inside the area when goal-kicks are taken, so perhaps the idea is to bypass this problem by going over it. But then when possession is regained after the aerial challenge, the pattern repeats from a higher starting point. There have been occasional signs of Issa Diop being more ambitious in his distribution with attempted vertical passes but they’ve been a mixed bag so far. Perhaps Haller and Fornals will allow the team to vary things up and play through the centre of the pitch more.
Chances are we’ll revert to the 4–3–3 against City and in games against the top 6 sides because if we play as openly against them as we have been in the last few games, we’ll get massacred. But moving forward from that, it’ll be in a 4–4–2; it’s something Pellegrini has relied on throughout his career and something he tried at the start of last season with Arnautović and Hernández, but he eventually gave up on it as that pairing didn’t have the mobility or link-up play to make the system work.
