Mo Gosfield
Well-known member
- Aug 11, 2010
- 6,376
I said to friends at the game yesterday that we cannot keep giving the ball away in dangerous areas. We make too many errors for a side with top ten aspirations. A lot of it is down to overthinking and overplaying. The very best sides keep it quick and simple and accurate. Not fancy spins and flicks 30 - 40 yards from your own goal. First touch is vital. Mitoma is superb. Minteh is a brick wall.It was working really well for twenty minutes. We were pressing them and not giving them the time to calibrate passes through the offside trap. Even when Palmer hit the post, it would have been called off for offside.
The loss had a lot more to do with giving the ball away in super dangerous positions rather than Chelsea abusing our high line.
"Can't play like this if we don't have faster CBs boohoo".. well, where are we finding the CB that catches up with Jackson when he gets a through ball from Webster?
The first goal was a situation where Webster puts them in a 2v1 where they're going to score four out of five times.
The second goal is an unnecessary (and honestly rather cheap) penalty were giving to them.
The third goal is an insane free kick from 200 meters and there's no defending against that one. But again the free kick wasn't a result of high defending, it was a result of giving the ball away very cheaply and then fouling the player.
The fourth goal is a result of Bart giving the ball away.
None of the goals are a consequence of the high back line. There's really extraordinarly little that indicates we'd have fared better if we had given Chelsea more time, ball and space on our half of the pitch.
Neither quicker defenders or lower defence line is going to prevent us from losing when repeatedly giving the ball to the opponent in super dangerous positions.
We need to tighten up and keep it simpler.