Manchester United - Tottenham

Great game yesterday, best I've seen us play this season!  I really liked the players we played with and how we used them - I felt we had a good mix of skill and physicality and everyone had great movement and interchanging of positions. The first half was so good and so entertaining that I barely had any gripes to jot down :)

1) The effect of playing with a tall man

You guys can tell I think very highly of Fellaini but sometimes, playing with a tall player like him can alter the decision making of teammates. With someone like him in your team, it pretty much becomes automatic to just look for him whenever you're crossing or taking a corner. 

You see here below, Blind has the ball on the left. I circled the three possible options he had (left out Rooney because I felt he's a little too well marked). I think Herrera would have easily been the best option - he has a yard of space and the pass to him is an easy straightforward short pass. 

Instead, Blind crosses it to Fellaini. Fellaini is marked by three players in this instance while Mata and Herrera only have one player on them and it's the same player. Fellaini is absolutely dominant in the air but to go for him far post with a long cross when there's two better options available doesn't make sense.

Result doesn't really matter here but one of the Tottenham players marking Fellaini (Danny Rose) intercepted the cross.

Another thing I wanted to point out is that Blind is left footed (although decent with his right) so Herrera is an even better option since it's much easier to just make a short pass with his right than having to loft a cross in to Fellaini with his off foot. 

2) Defensive issues - overcrowding

We kept a clean sheet and we looked pretty solid in defense with Smalling playing quite well and being a decent threat dribbling it out of defense. However, there's still some issues with our defensive coordination as a team.

Example 1:

Tottenham has the ball and they're attacking here. Why are all four of our players bunched up in such a close position when the Tottenham players are more spread out and there's no one for them to mark?

I think this is a mistake by Smalling and he's too aggressive here. He's the one I marked with a red star. Here, he actually sprints forward from defense to close the Tottenham players down but why does he need to do that when there's already three other United players there ready to close them down? It exposes our back line and now Valencia has to move centrally to cover for him.

Additionally, I circled Blind who I also felt was too aggressive and made a mistake in pressing/closing down. He's pretty darn far from the the Tottenham player who is about to receive the ball here but he chooses to sprint and try to intercept the ball.

As you see below, he's a fraction too late and Dembele turns into tons of space. Now Jones, who I circled in blue, has to cover for Blind and leave the Tottenham player he was marking (and Valencia isn't in a good position to cover for that player if there's a through ball). 

Instead of going for the interception, all Blind had to do was check his run forward and Dembele would have turned and immediately been met by Blind defending him. 

In the picture above, you can see that we have a lot of players defending but all of them are behind the ball and out of position.

Example 2:

79th minute here, they're battling for the ball in the middle. You see there's three United players close to the ball and three Tottenham players, that's perfectly well matched, no new to get another player to help defend especially since we're at the center circle.

You see Fellaini here starts running towards the ball the help. Rooney also starts to come as well.

The problem with that is that it pulls them out of position and leaves their man free. The ball gets to the Spurs player who drives it forward along the black arrow - the place that Fellaini vacated to needlessly help. 

We've been struggling with this for a while - for some reason our players like to "over help" when there's a someone trying to dribble around. They need to trust their teammates and maybe working on some one on one defending rather than relying on pure numbers and crowding to deal with a dribbler. Otherwise, it leaves massive gaps in other places of the field for the opposition to exploit (for example, Nacho Monreal's goal against us from the Oxlade-Chamberlain dribble, see point #2 in this post).

3) Van Gaal still likes to sneak in the back 5 formation

We sat back and pressed a little less during the second half. That's perfectly fine since we're up 3-0 and it's less demanding physically and may avoid injuries. However, I still think we were too defensive and LVG continues to switch to a 5 at the back formation when we need to defend a lead and I think it's confusing for our players and we never look too solid playing 5 at the back. I already mentioned it in our game against Sunderland (the 6th point). 

I circled the 5 in blue, the 4 midfielders in red and Rooney in black. It's a clear 5-4-1 formation and you can see Ashley Young in the bottom right of the picture shifting to left back. The weird thing is, Young isn't even marking anyone - there's no Tottenham player close to him

4) Smalling's missed header

Smalling had and has been playing really well but I still noticed some errors that puts him a level or two beyond top center backs like Ferdinand and Vidic. Below, he's trying to head the ball away from a long goal kick and he completely misjudges the flight of the ball. The ball goes above his head - he completely missed it here but he had plenty of time and wasn't under a lot of pressure (for a defensive header).

It wasn't a big deal since Jones had him covered but you never saw Ferdinand or Vidic misjudge the flight of the ball so badly that they completely missed it. It didn't look like it was a windy day so it should have been a relatively straight forward defensive header.

5) Sloppy back line

This occurs just after we defend a corner and Harry Kane has the ball. There's a few seconds as Harry Kane dribbles it a little before he crosses.

Look at our defensive line - it's a sloppy diagonal mess. If our entire team lined up perfectly just on the edge of the penalty area (and we had time to do that), Adebayor would have been offside. Instead, our weird diagonal line played him onside. The Tottenham players are also farther back - it's not like they're on our shoulders so there's no reason not to push the line up and make it straight.

Conclusion

Well, I got the short entry I was hoping for, barely had anything to write down in the first half :) I try to avoid writing about the good things we do since this is a critical blog. Thanks for reading!