Pass-master: Micheal Carrick versus Italy - Who says he cannot forward pass

Carrick have been out of the national team for some time. The past and current national coach do not think he is good enough versus the likes of Lampard, Milner, Barry and Henderson.

Well, he got called up and did his usual.

Tell me what you think of this performance.

Trequartista: Tom Cleverley vs Italy all passes, touches

Tom Cleverley got his first England call up versus Italy. A very good team and he came up against De Rossi and gang in an advance midfield position.
Despite the numerous raves, i thought as a trequartista he did rather nothing worth of note. People do have too low an expectation of a No 10 to rave too much.

Trequartista: Wayne Rooney vs Hannover 96 all touches,passing

Here is the thing about Wayne Rooney. You gotta hate him for coming back pre-season looking disinterested. This game shows me how fat he has become. I wonder why people call Lampard fat. This guy is even worse.

To top it off, that was a blatant dive and he seem to make it his specialty

But if there is one person in the team that can do what scholes does, it is really this man. He spreads play better than Kagawa,Carrick or Cleverley. Great range of passing

Trequartista(No 10): Shinji Kagawa vs Hannover 96

All touches, passing and goals of Kagawa here.

Shinji Kagawa have shown that he is probably not here to sell shirts. Another competent display this time at center mid. It looks like he can do the job, but my feel is that he leaves a lot of holes as does Cleverley.

Sooner or later we will be exposed.

Passmaster: Tom Cleverley vs Hannover 96 #MUFC

Tom Cleverley have been missing for last season so many united fans have been wanting to see the Cleverley and Anderson combo again.

In this match, he combines with Shinji Kagawa and Anderson in one of the most passing midfield united have every seen in a long time.

Here are all his passes

Its time to stop pigeon hole players to conventional positions

We heard too much that we want a box to box central midfielder, a defensive midfielder or an attacking midfielder, but soccer coaches in countries other than England have always been innovative in evolving from convention to nullify or solve popular tactical trends.

We so have

1. A defensive midfielder playing at an advance position
2. A defensive midfielder being deployed in defense for an overall passing side focus on possession
3. A roving winger who act as a playmaker instead of an conventional winger/playmaker
4. Loop sided full backs
5. Deep-lying playmakers as oppose to an advance one

Bringing in foreign coaches and managers like Jose Mourinho, Benitez and Wenger have changed how Sir Alex understands the game and react accordingly.

As fans, it is easy to say Carrick is fuck, Anderson is not up to it, but the demands of midfield, where most battle is fought, requires a group of midfielders that can play in a few different configurations successfully.

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Iain Dowie introduces us to the brave new world of front-quarterbacks

Surfing through the sports TV channels late one night this week I came across a scene that I can only describe as rapturous, but also addled with dreamy incomprehension, like stumbling into a forest clearing and finding a baby faun with its fetlock caught in a gamekeeper's trap. As part of a Euro 2012 England squad preview item, Sky Sports News had placed Iain Dowie on a kind of raised papal dais flanked by a tactics board. From here Dowie was being encouraged to manipulate a series of plastic discs in a revolving, carefree, maniacal fashion, like a drunken auctioneer, while shouting out names ("Lampard! … Gerrard! … the Stewart Downings!") as well as numbers ("4‑2‑3‑1! 4-1-3-2!"). There was something soothing about watching Dowie peeking into the future with brimstone zeal, right up until the moment he started talking about Wayne Rooney playing next summer as "a false 10 … maybe even a front-quarterback".

I'm not here to mock either the notion of the front-quarterback or Dowie, whom I like as a pundit and admired hugely as a player whose every moment seemed to be spent in a tumbling, grappling wrestle, football as reinterpreted by the last man standing on the Raft Of The Medusa. I remember one Northern Ireland game where Dowie's teenaged marker, clearly not warned about all this, spent the entire 90 minutes in a state of outraged disbelief as the Dowie forearm expertly chopped his windpipe and the Dowie rump clattered once again into his breadbasket.

Dowie is also an educated man with an interest in theory, but even he seemed overcome by visions of an unusually fluid post-Spain England, cranium bulging with nascent idea-power like a caveman incanting his half-glimpsed vision of iron horses and flying man-birds. English football has struggled with its vocabulary of ideas in the past, but here was a sense of fences being leapt, mental chains thrown off, the front‑quarterback ushered into existence as a gorgeously promising oxymoron.

Really we should be encouraging this kind of creativity. The old positional straitjacketing has only ever reined in our soaringly incomplete half‑talents. We should instead be minting fresh roles, instigating the first real revolution in English player categories since the 1960s, and absorbing more fully into our vocabulary the positional complexity the Premier League brings every week. For example, David Silva is not so much an attacking midfielder as the consummate roving invention ferret. Yaya Touré has evolved from defensive shield to rampant barging goal bouncer. Ashley Young has become a top-class peripheral semi-jink. Scott Parker is a model of the central attack dwarf; while Frank Lampard has withdrawn recently into the panting box-chug pivot role. Most encouragingly, Jack Wilshere has shown great promise in the vital modern position of rubbery midfield flexi-hog.

There may even be something liberating for the next generation in a little linguistic Dowie-ing over. At times during the midweek friendly against Sweden it seemed that English football is experiencing a glut of young players who defy the normal categories. The hugely promising Phil Jones is, like Rooney, definitely a false something or other. But a false what? Essentially, Jones is really good at running forwards through great yawning foreigner-gaps, striding past the fallen and the prone like a coiffured robot warrior god. But is that really a position?

Similarly, there is the question of Jack Rodwell and his mysteriously non-specific talent. What does Rodwell do exactly? "He's a big boy," Roy Keane kept muttering admiringly on punditry duties. But being a big boy is not a position either, albeit at times against Sweden England did seem to be employing a 4-3-Big Boy-2 formation, as Rodwell lurked in a position best described as Floating Central Trot-About or Galloping Midfield Run-Hulk.

English football has always struggled to describe, and therefore also to visualise, positions that go beyond the standard. In Italy there are technical terms for the fine gradations within being "a striker" – prima punta, seconda punta, trequartista – that seem to go beyond simply big man, small man or being in the hole.

There has been great progress recently. The idea of the "false" player, particularly the "false 9", has already entered the vocabulary (and this is surely what Dowie meant rather than the edgier-sounding "false 10" who, according to expert advice sourced from Twitter, "makes runs into the space left by a false 9"; I think this must be a joke). Perhaps we have also accepted falseness because the word carries connotations of transgression and overseas sneak appeal, a position that can only exist at one remove from the real or the proper, a shadowy half-brother swooshing about the rafters in a cape.

As physiques and technical abilities coalesce in every area of the pitch, a galvanising positional libertarianism may well be football's final frontier. For now the suggestion amid Dowie's humid gesticulations, buoyed by a draught of unexpected English confidence, was of a more realistic kind of microdiversity, a technophile re-reclassification whereby English players may become unapologetically what they are – flawed but thrilling, unevenly gifted – rather than being instead defined by their deficiencies. It does at the very least sound like a lot of fun. Bring on the front-quarterback. Bring on the surging English Run-Hulk.

An example of the importance of coaches in winning games

As observers, we often commented that our best players had an off day and it will not always occur, but teams wanting results would find out what is our most important link and break it.
We generally admit that our midfield isn't the best but teams are also set up accordingly to disrupt. It is only a matter of time before people see Rooney being that important link and design a system for it.
We sometimes see a problem but we really have different interpretation of the problem.
This article highlights that how important coaches are. Having a great backroom staff supporting is so important nowadays.

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A coach I once worked with arrived at the club with a dismal record against Arsenal and, as a result, seemed to have developed an unhealthy obsession with blunting their cutting edge. His gameplan was, in effect, very simple, but it relied on correctly identifying a specific Arsenal player and nullifying his threat; this, our coach said, was the key to victory. Toeing the party line, we began working on it in training, the idea being that, wherever Emmanuel Adebayor went, a centre-half would follow him, a midfield player would drop into the space left and a forward would then sit on the deepest lying midfielder to stop him getting the ball. We worked on it all week until we were sure we had got it spot-on.

On the Saturday we started the game full of confidence but conspired to lose the match with ease, Adebayor scoring a terrific goal in the process. Undeterred, our coach convinced the manager to stick with the same strategy in games against Chelsea and Manchester United, when we got favourable results.

For the record, the players that were singled out for the man-marking treatment in those two matches were Wayne Rooney and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, Claude Makelele, for whom we used an advanced midfielder.

The latter game was where our coach earned his money. The side effect of nullifying Makelele's strongest attributes – breaking up the play and giving the ball to his more adventurous team-mates – meant he would be unable to start any attacks. We were sceptical at first but, after watching a DVD showing the Frenchman winning the ball and setting Chelsea on the attack time and again, everyone bought into the idea that it may well be a sound tactic.

At the top level it can often take a team of editors and Prozone experts working around the clock to identify a single weakness in another team; anybody can watch a football match but not everybody is able to see why things are happening.

For all of the above to come to fruition, the coach needed the trust of the manager, which can never be taken as a given. There are managers at all levels who find it impossible to delegate even the simplest of tasks, from telling the chef how to cook pasta (which I have seen, by the way) to arguing with the club doctor or physio about the diagnosis of an injured player. Some are, to be blunt, control freaks.

[Read full article at Guardian >>]