Baggies not playing to strengths

Sunday, 30/10/2011

by Dave Wedgbury, Shoot's West Brom blogger

Albion fans arrived at the Hawthorns full of confidence after two successive wins against Wolves and Villa, but it was plain to see from the kick off that we were now playing a much better team Saturday.

Liverpool, with their revamped team and big money signings played neat and tidy football and in Suarez had a player who can cause problems for any defence.

Although Liverpool had most of the play, most of the corners and threatened whenever they attacked, they only won by two goals and both had an element of misfortune about them. They were awarded a penalty after Thomas bundled over Suarez, the penalty dispatched with ease, and Jonas Olsson gave the ball away which led to a breakaway attack and a goal by Carroll.

It was 2-0, but Albion fans who were there will tell you that we were never really in the game, our attacking threat in the first half was nothing more than weak and we struggled to maintain possession whenever we managed to get the ball.

There are many different viewpoints on the actual problems with our team, yes it may appear that I am overly negative after two great wins, but I believe you have to look at performance, selection and formation to predict how we will get on against other teams. We looked more threatening after the break but it could be argued that Liverpool may have took their foot off the accelerator by then and settled on the 2-0 win.

My concerns are that we have players in our team with specific strengths, but the formation and tactics do not allow these strengths to be utilised. Thomas is an attacking winger, who on his day will cause problems for any full back, we all witnessed this last year and know when in full flight he can be almost impossible to stop without bringing him down.

This season he has become a more defensive midfielder who tackles much more and it is obvious his first job is to protect his fullback. This means that when we do break out from defence, Thomas is so deep that he cannot really attack his fullback, he must first beat the midfielder in front of him – inevitably he ends up passing sidewards or backwards and the attacking flair has gone.

Brunt has one of the sweetest left feet in the division and can cross a ball as good as Beckham did, but do we see that anymore? I can’t recall him being in a position to put a telling crossing into the area to stretch the keeper and central defender, he too is putting his defensive duties first.

This leads to out strikers, Odemwingie is a striker who thrives on the last man, anticipating mistakes and relishing those accurate defence splitting balls to get behind the defence, he can then use his speed and trickery to cause all kinds of problems.

This season he is feeding off scraps, hopeful long high balls that he rarely has any chance of winning, we are turning on of the best goal scoring strikers into a dejected figure running around hoping the defence make a mistake and miss one of those long balls. But if your midfield is deep and the creativity in the centre consists of Mulumbu and Scharner then those defence splitting balls will be few and far between.

Yes I can understand that it is safety first but there must be a fine balance, surely we need Dorrans or give the youngster Thorne a chance in the centre and see if we can re-ignite Odemwingie.

Playing 4-4-2 relies upon the pairing up front to have a great understanding and create chances and space for each other – this doesn’t appear to be happing at present – yes we beat Villa but with two corners, not to do with our formation or strikers.

Roy must know this but obviously he has his preferred methods, my question is are we making the players conform to the formation when we should be using the formation that suits the players strengths at our club?

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