Snowflake RoyalZip Someone on here made the good point that the successful teams in this division get the ball moving forward quickly. We don’t. On the rare occasions we do get upfield quickly we look good. Yesterday’s goal being a case in point where Swift passes out wide. The ball is then progressed to McCleary who attacks the byline and pulls it back to Ejaria. Sadly we rarely do this with our centre backs often lumbering forward with the ball to little effect.
Yeah. That superb move was uncharacteristic in so many ways. Martinez going longer than usual to Yiadom rathrr than Moore / Miazga / a deep midfielder, Swift quickly apraying the ball wide toBlackett rather than taking someone on or passing into congested midfield, Blackett playing a firm first time pass straight up the wing...
Its the ideal of what Stam and Gomes want but it happens about once every 5 games.
It happened a lot more than usual. There were at least two superb cross field balls from Baker out to the left wing. The first half was probably the best 45 mins he's played in some time. Meite was targeted a few times and a lot of balls were played directly into Oliveira too so I'm not sure we really have quite the obsession with passing around the back that people perceive. Even when we did we transitioned out of it very well into midfield on a number of occasions especially the first half.
One thing I have noticed though and certainly doesn't help us is that Liam Moore almost exclusively only passes to the person directly next to him. A number of times he could have by passed Miazga out to the full back or inside forward positions but constantly just rolled it to the nearest player thus slowing absolutely everything down. I've no idea if this is some sort of hangover from the Stam days but his first season here under Stam he was much more positive with the ball and would even regularly bring the ball out of defence himself. Now his only mode is pass directly to the nearest person. It's incredibly frustrating.
Another thing which didn't help is that Oliveira wasn't his usual self in terms of holding the ball up. He still did the odd good thing but in general it just didn't stick with him as it usually would.