by YorkshireRoyal99 »
18 Feb 2023 11:31
Fezza Carroll isn’t the whole issue.
When you only have the players available that allow you to play 5-3-2 with two defensive mids (one of whom is a repurposed cb) and without any playmaker, you’ll always be one dimensional.
Azeez needs to play in a side with other quick players and a player in the middle who plays attacking passes (regrettably Ejaria has made himself unplayable).
Ince is damned by the options available to him.
Just posted this elsewhere, but we've brought Casadei in who does have a bit more of a technical edge to the team. Fornah is comfortable with the ball, so is Ince etc.
We don't have to flip the script on what we do, we just have to take what we've got and find a different way of doing it. At the moment, all we do is sit in, soak up pressure and hope for a mistake. Why can't we sit in, soak up pressure but bring some more technical players into the game where we can look after possession a little bit more and then maybe we can carry more of a threat? That might not suit Carroll, but it still doesn't stop us going longer into Carroll for knock downs either and that way we'd have more bodies around him rather than just one in Azeez, where the chances are he's not going to get it and, even if he does, he's got 3/4 Cardiff bodies around.
If you go back and count the number of times Carroll wins the first header and Azeez doesn't get the second ball or (probably a better way of saying it) the ball goes to a Cardiff player it will be ridiculous. That's not Azeez's fault, how can you expect anyone, whether you're 21 or 35, to get a second ball from a flick on when you're outnumbered 1 to 3/4? Carroll is reliable in the air, but the judging where the flick on will go is not as reliable, hence why we turn the ball over during that phase so often.
It's predictable. We just need to find different ways of playing the way we do and we do have players with different skillsets that are able to do that. We don't have to tear up the blueprint and start again, we just have to try and find different ways of playing in a low block that can change the pattern of the game. That's what is costing us results away at the moment. Not necessarily the shape.