Minority Report v Sheffield United

All teams have injuries. Good managers deal with that.

This season ours have presented difficulties but when faced with those difficulties the Head Coach seems to have unerringly chosen the poorest option. Moon on Sunday instead of Hondermarck being the latest example.

The manager was also dealt a poor hand in terms of the back room/fitness staff. I’d say of the 2 main issues this is more difficult to deal with but it doesn’t take away what seems to be from comments coming from the squad about a lack of leadership, direction and management.

As someone who appreciates the tactical side of things what’s your view on MS ability to change the game through tactical substitutions or through tactical tweaks mid game? Subs appear to me to be pretty much like for like rather then tactical changes. The Middlesbrough game I thought showed MS inflexibility we started reasonably well but Warnock made tactical adjustments we did not respond and the game ran away from us.

The matches more than anything are miserable. Dour depressing and one dimensional. The players maybe showed MS the way forward on Sunday by rallying themselves and moving the ball more quickly. Can MS learn from that and run with it. A few weeks ago I would have hoped so but I just don’t see it now.

Of course the proviso in all that is that I would love you to be right and me to be wrong.

 

Chortling….

 

100%correct

 

Once again you resort to your patronising tone. Why do you have to do this? Talking down to people is not a good look my friend.

I could give a more detailed response to your diatribe, but I'll leave it as the fact is I am not angry at all. I am sad and disappointed that we look a Shadow of the team from only 5 months ago. The tactics and training, practicing set pieces comes from the Head Coach. From what I have seen so far there has been little attempt to improve such things when clearly they aren't working.

 

It isn't the systems fault when Liam Kitching allows Mousset to get in front of him at the far post for an easy tap in.

 

One of the features of Ismael's season was that he never changed the basic formation. OK, when teams refused to cooperate with us, and in response to our long ball, they hit the long ball right back at us and refused to build from the back, the the front 3 dropped into a 1 with two players deeper and we became less effective, but he never changed the basic structure of 3-4-3. The teams that did that were the teams with less confidence, the teams that were struggling in the league, and we were less effective against them because our press worked less effectively. Now, I only mention Ismael because he was lauded because he never changed tactics. The difference is of course that Ismael was winning, and Schopp is not. People are much happier watching one dimensional game play if the team is winning.

Ismael had very few injuries last season. The only long-term injuries were to Ben Williams and Liam Kitching and they were not important because our other defenders stayed fit. How do you think that his system would have coped with the loss of so many important players last season. Would his team have been able to win in spite of the injuries. That is why I showed his team with asterisks against the injured players. I wanted people to understand what a difference those injuries would have made to Ismael's team last season. Frankly, for some games this season, things have been even worse, and that is not the end of it, because there is also a long list of players who cannot play the whole 90 minutes, and that has to be managed too.

I explained why I thought Schopp had picked Moon instead of Hondermarck, but there was certainly an improvement in our movement when Hondermarck came on. A coach can have good reasons for doing something, but because the game goes against him, those reasons appear ridiculous. Nevertheless, the reasoning behind the original decision was still sound, even though the outcome is poor. As I said, he was trying to keep a clean sheet and thought he needed extra height at defensive set pieces to do so.

I did not see the Middlesbrough game so I cannot comment upon it. However, since you have mentioned Performance Index, it was our second worst score of the season (Bournemouth being the worst). Just looking at that basic index score was damning enough, without being put through the hell of having to actually having to watch it. If were were going to play a back 3, 2 centre-backs and Hondermarck was always going to be a problem. It looks like he should have played a back 4, but as I say, I did not see the game and my observations are based upon logic only, with no actual game input.

 

There were other errors for the second goal, and it is hard to recover when team-mates make errors like that, no matter what the system because players are out of position trying to recover the first error.

 

You seem to struggle to grasp the fact that you have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever to analyse football tactics yourself yet you do so, believing you understand it better than us mere mortals. i don't have a problem with your reports, I have a problem with how you talk down to others like they're idiots. Like I said, highly patronising, but you won't accept that because you're too arrogant. It's just us that get the wrong impression, right?

I won't continue this because I have made my point and I have better things to do with my time than spend it on you and your terrible attitude.

 

I don't like pizza at all.

When I went to see my mate the other day, guess what he served me?

Frankly, the Food Index figures for that evening are awful. Minus 11,000,000 for the bread, and -1 for the sauce.

 

Except that I include myself in the analysis. I have no qualifications in football analysis either. I am just the same as every other commentator on here. However, where my comments differ is that I assume the coach knows more about the game than I do, and because of that, my comments aim to try to understand the reasoning of the coach, rather than simply dismissing his decisions as being tactically naive. He will have his reasons for doing everything that he does, and the fact that he is not getting the right results does not alter that fact. On the opposition bench sits another coach who also knows far more about the game than I do. Whether he knows more about the game than our coach does is open to debate, but whilst our coach is handicapped by the list of injuries that the team is carrying, I do not think that it is fair or indeed right to make that final judgement.

 

I do not understand what you are talking about. Everyone likes pizza.

 

Jasper Moon is a young, inexperienced player, only just finding his feet in professional football, still with a lot to learn in his usual and more comfortable position, and still making a lot of mistakes and struggling to get to the level required in that position. The decision to select such a player in a different position, where he's not nearly as comfortable or effective is not a sound one, it's not even close. It is detrimental to both the team and the player. Doesn't matter how tall he is it's shocking management. You don't do that to personnel you're supposed to be trying to nurture in any industry, not if you have any managerial skills at all.

 

I don't.

 

Well you can cancel that invitation round to our house for diner then. Pizza is my speciality.

 

Fair enough.

 

I love most things italian.... but that was one of their more spectacular aberrations.

 

I think that going back to the boro game.....we were tactically out done by Neil Warnock!!
I think that just speaks volumes....one of the criticisms I have heard is that our coach is used to experienced players who do his thinking for him fast forward to us ...he has the youngest team in the world with very little experience (as a squad) and they need training and coaching and to be tactically more astute.
Warnock has made a career out of his (ahem) style but he used to rely heavily on set pieces for goals ....its just one more detail i find lacking in our tactically inept coach. I still absolutely blame our glorious leaders for the appointment and being asleep at the wheel during the summer.

 

I ran the data through my super computer and the answer it gave was 42

 

Strange that you answer queries about MS tactics with answers about VI.