West Ham vs Newcastle post-match tactical breakdown 12/09/2020
Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd
It was the opening game. We had a curtailed pre-season. Several important players were away on international duty last week. Some disjointedness was to be expected.
Even so, if you ever wanted an example of a team that’s confused about what it’s doing, look no further than this:
Rice drops into a very narrow position to receive the ball and doesn’t open up his body properly, so he’s forced back inside. From there he stalls, dribbles a bit, does some pointing, before he eventually gives up and rolls a square pass to Diop. At no point during this passage of play does anyone ahead of the ball show for him.
Throughout the game, Rice kept dropping to the left to make a back three in possession for no discernible reason whatsoever:
The shape of the team gets clogged up because the wide central defenders don’t spread far enough apart or offer proper passing angles to one another; Rice doesn’t help things either by moving back late and sitting too narrowly. Neither Ogbonna nor Diop seem to be aware that Rice has dropped back and both were clueless about what to actually do when they realised what was happening — Ogbonna in particular struggled to reorient himself as the middle one in the 3. It felt like this movement either wasn’t coached or if it was, the message didn’t get through at all.
And what does Rice actually achieve once he’s back there? Does he do anything on the ball that one of the CBs couldn’t? Add in Noble’s natural tendency to go and play in the space of his defenders and you end up with ridiculous situations like this:
…where you’ve got a back four comprising Noble/Diop/Ogbonna/Rice. Souček is the only West Ham player in this massive chunk of the pitch and he’s inaccessible because of the positioning of Carroll and Wilson. Hardly surprising that midfield ends up completely vacated when your two CMs are playing full-back.
Everything has to start somewhere, and there’s no harm in trying new things to evolve our approach, but this isn’t something that the team has ever done before. It’s not a role that Rice has ever fulfilled before and we didn’t attempt to play like this any of the friendlies. Why were we doing it here?
There also needs to be some purpose behind it.
During Mikel Arteta’s first few months at Arsenal, he had Xhaka doing something similar with his back four:
It worked here for Arsenal because:
- Xhaka’s left-footed and a brilliant passer of the ball
- it’s properly organised — the properly spaced back 3 allows them to switch play from side-to-side quickly and it stretches the Everton pressing shape, which in turn opens passing lanes (particularly to Ceballos in the middle of the pitch)
- it liberates David Luiz to drive forward and use his genuinely excellent passing ability to progress the ball for his team, with the security of cover on either side of him
- it allows their LB to push forward and basically play as a winger…
- … which in turn frees up Aubameyang to move centrally early and enables him to make runs in behind like a centre forward, without ruining balance of the team or leaving left wing unoccupied
I guess the thinking behind mimicking this tactic was that it would allow Fornals to push further inside and get on the ball more in central areas, acting as an additional playmaker in that role (in contrast to Aubameyang interpreting it as an extra striker).
Safe to say that idea failed miserably: Fornals had fewer touches than any other outfield starter and only one more than Newcastle goalkeeper Karl Darlow.
This approach was a non-starter straight off the bat because it was immediately apparent that Newcastle clearly weren’t going to chase down our defenders when they had the ball. There was therefore nothing to be gained by moving a player from central midfield into our backline.
There was similarly little benefit to pushing Cresswell so high up the pitch; he doesn’t have the dynamism or dribbling ability to play like a winger. If we’re going down this route, we need to reintegrate Arthur Masuaku back into the fold for games like this. In this set up, he can fuck off up the pitch without worrying about turning the ball over because we’ve got someone covering his position.
Perhaps the most baffling aspect is what we did with Ogbonna though. Rice is a tidy passer with both feet and probably better on the ball than Ogbonna, but sticking your only natural left-footer in the middle of your 3 makes no sense at all. Putting Rice there ruined our spacing, made it difficult to get the ball to the left side of the pitch, and threw off the balance of the shape.
If we’re being uncharitable, this whole thing felt like the coaching staff had sat down over summer and thought to themselves “this is what big clubs do, we should do it too” without actually considering why those teams do it.
Neither one thing nor the other
Out of possession, we decided to mostly stand off the Newcastle defenders, presumably to encourage them to play out from the back:
Newcastle weren’t interested in that though and the resulting lack of pressure on the ball meant the player in possession consistently had time and space to pick out long passes into Wilson and Carroll. More often than not, it proved successful.
But it’s not like we compensated for the lack of an aggressive press by retaining a compact shape behind the ball. Newcastle carved us apart with basic straight line passes on multiple occasions:
We were chasing the game at this point, but the build-up to the second goal was awful. Everyone got sucked over to the right side and ended up ball-watching while Jeff Hendrick sauntered into the box completely unchallenged to score:
We basically elected for a worst of both worlds approach.
We weren’t much better defending in transition either:
Despite all three players starting at roughly the same point, both Rice and Souček get burnt for pace by Jonjo Shelvey. You know you’re in trouble when that happens.
Speaking of Rice…
Diagon Alley
In the post-lockdown fixtures, it looked like Rice had developed his passing range a bit but on Saturday he attempted far too many unnecessary diags.
Newcastle defended narrowly and left the flanks open, so trying these passes isn’t the worst idea in the world, but they were hit so slowly and predictably that it was easy for Lewis/Manquillo/Hendrick to close the gap and contest the ball. Rice’s execution was all over the place anyway:
Although he had a couple of nice passes into the right channel for Fredericks, this game exposed Rice’s limitations in possession at this point in his career. Between this and the pseudo-back 3 nonsense, he was asked to do far too much for this side in this game.
He had a poor game overall and I thought he looked knackered, which is understandable considering he got through 180 mins for England a week ago.
It’s easy to forget that Rice is only 21 and that’s he played an awful lot of football in the last two seasons. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the matchday squad for the Charlton game tomorrow. Let him put his feet up.
A string lacking from Jarrod’s Bow(en)
When Yarmolenko replaced Fornals for the last 25 mins, it forced Jarrod Bowen onto the left wing.
Bowen spent much of his time on the left tucked inside but the one occasion he found himself in a wide area after this switch showed his discomfort playing as an orthodox winger:
It’s a slightly awkward situation overall, but you can see Bowen’s reluctance to go down the outside when Manquillo squares him up.
If we only had a direct left-footed winger who plays his best football on the left and just spent a year learning how to play against set defences…
No man is an island, but Antonio’s on one
Our problems moving the ball from back to front meant that Michail Antonio spent all game playing with his back to goal. Newcastle defended well against him by restricting the space Antonio had to turn into and by doubling up on him where they could, thus rendering him largely ineffective as an attacking force.
This is the kind of service he was getting though:
Ogbonna bounces in a pass at chest height for Antonio to deal with and the striker ends up controlling it with his arm.
But look at the ocean of space Antonio’s in when he receives the ball. There’s not a West Ham shirt within 20 yards of him in any direction:
He’s going to struggle to be effective against teams who defend deeply anyway, but we’re going to exacerbate that problem if we don’t get players in close proximity to support his hold up play.
Conclusion
Carroll should’ve been off after 10 seconds and we clipped the top of the bar twice, so it’s fair to say we had some rough luck on top of a piss poor performance.
And perspective is important: it’s only one match, these things happen.
But we were awful in basically every phase of the game and Newcastle didn’t have to play especially well to beat us comfortably. There’s enough stuff here to cause concern if it continues.
A few games where we can go back to playing direct football and don’t have to worry about what we’re doing in possession might do us some good. Arsenal can be got at, Leicester have their own vulnerabilities, and Spurs were insipid against Everton yesterday. Grinding out a few points from those games is both possible and, now, a necessity .
