Total Pageviews

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

New Formation Needed, Pards

Yesterday I lamented on the fact that we have no current internationals in the squad, sorry Magic, and Pards shouldn't waste his time looking at any potential Euro08 players because they won't be coming to SE7. The Second Division these days is very different territory and we have to cut our cloth etc, etc.
No, these days its the non-league for us. And another player from that vast forest of untapped talent seems to be heading this way in Stuart Fleetwood and I for one can't see any harm in that. He's cheap, with a reported 150k making its way across to Forest Green, gets goals and bearing in mind the £2m we spent on Luke Varney for a scant reward of 7 goals from 24 starts must be worth a try and he'll presumably be hungry, which I suppose is something that Pards doesn't see in Marcus Bent, for instance. And neither does Steve Bruce apparently.
The news on Wiki, if you believe that sort of thing, is that he's already joined us, Fleetwood that is, so perhaps we shouldn't mention the fact that of his 32 League goals last season only 6 have came this year, ie since January 1st. Shades of Marcus then.
And with the news that Amady Faye is returning to the Valley, once Pards has had a word or two, its perhaps good news that there's a need for more midfielders in todays world.
This was given a full explanation in a very interesting article in the guardian the other day, advocating a new formation, a 4-6-0 mainly because there's not many good centre-forwards ( sorry strikers) these days so that most teams have to do without them. The advice comes from Carlos Alberto Parreira, the coach who had led Brazil to victory in the 1994 World Cup. Good job we've got Holland, Semedo, ZiZi, Racon, Sam, Shelvey, Jerry Thomas, Ambrose, Sinclair, Basey, the other Thomas and Wagstaff to cover for us. And not forgetting the returning Josh Wright and now A. Faye.
And there's also some added advice in the same article from Arrigo Sacchi, ex manager of Milan, the last team to win back to back Euro Cups. 'I told him (Gullit) that five organised players would always beat 10 disorganised ones,' Sacchi explained. 'And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi. They had 10 players: Gullit, Van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari. They had 15 minutes to score against my five players and the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from 10 metres inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.'
Which I suppose does go to explain what happened to the Addicks in the second half of the season when we used something like 28 players. Can so many changes give us organisation? Probably not. Promoted Hull City in contrast played just 30 all season. And the thought of Sacchi's 5 organised players does remind me of the 5 occasions last season when we coped very well indeed with only 10 players on the park.
So apparently that's todays keyword, Pards, organisation and less is good as far as strikers is concerned, but not in the case of midfielders. Get to it!

No comments: