Manchester United - Manchester City

Great match this weekend, a win over City scoring 4 goals, really a big turn around compared to earlier in the season when we could barely score! Again I was really impressed by Fellaini - basically any time one of our players doesn't know where to pass the ball, all they have to do is kick it somewhere within his vicinity and he magically cushions it on his chest. 

We really do have a good balance in our team right now - Young/Mata have a lot of pressure on them as they're keeping Di Maria and Januzaj out of the team but they're playing so well and fit so well with our team balance I don't see Di Maria taking a starting position over either of them. 

Looking over my notes, I didn't really have much to criticize after the 60th minute. We were up 2-1 at that point and mostly just keeping possession and after being up 4-1, nothing really mattered. One problem I noticed is that when Di Maria and Falcao gets subbed on, the balance of our team and our team chemistry seems to get thrown off. 

Most of my points will be on our defense which I thought was awful today. I'm not sure why Jones started over Rojo (could be a lot of reasons, maybe Rojo had a little cold, impossible to know). I promised myself when I was taking notes that I would omit anything I saw from Valencia - I'm only going to make one point about him briefly because otherwise I can spend 3 hours writing about his mistakes every single game.

1) Valencia still doesn't know how to throw the ball

Just getting Valencia out of the way before I move on.

Example 1:You see his back foot in the air? This one he actually got lucky and it was still touching the ground when he released the ball but if he was throwing with proper form, his foot should be touching the ground still (since he should be dragging the toe against the turf).





















Example 2:

He throws it back to our center back (Smalling) in our own half instead of just going forward along the blue arrow. You can't tell from this picture but the ball is bouncing and it's not easy for Smalling to deal with it. 



This is the end result, pretty stressful situation and we didn't even keep possession. 





Example 3:

This is from the same throw in as the picture above. I can't believe that from a simple throw in, I can find two things that are obviously wrong.

You see he's still touching the ball even though it's already way past his head - that's an illegal throw in (even the commentator on NBC mentioned it). You can find a source here, it says "delivers the ball from behind and over his head." This is not behind his head. This isn't a rare rule or anything - referees will call this often and a professional player in charge of throwing the ball in should know this.

2) Jones makes too many careless mistakes

Example 1

Jones has the ball here and he has two options to his left - either forward to Ashley Young or back to Blind. He has time and space and is under no real pressure here.



Except for some reason, he continues dribbling the ball towards Young (instead of passing it to him immediately) and this is the end result.  




















Example 2:

Jones has the ball here after a simple back pass from Blind. 

This is the result, we lose the ball (but get it back a few seconds later fortunately). I think he panics here and takes a really heavy touch because he senses a City playing closing him down behind him but you see by the picture above that he had a lot of space and a lot of options.

Example 3:

Jones is circled in blue. The easy pass here is just a simple 5 foot pass to Carrick who is open. 

Instead, he passes it back to De Gea and the pass is a little too soft and it's a little too close for comfort. At this point, De Gea has no time to pick out a pass and he boots it long and we lose possession. 

Example 4:

Just look at this below picture - we're not in any danger at all. The City player is surrounded, we have a bunch of players back, Aguero (bottom left) is even offside. Jones, circled in blue, ends up doing the only thing that could have created danger for us - he fouled the City player.

It wasn't an accidental foul or a dive - it was just a blatant one for no reason.

The good side of Jones

Sometimes I feel a little bad for continuously criticizing players since I'm a fan of all of team and the entire team but that's the point of this blog. Can't improve if you don't recognize your mistakes.

Below here is Jones (circled in blue) at his best. City are counter attacking and you see the City player (Milner) is much closer to the ball. Jones rushes forward and makes a perfect clean tackle to intercept the pass and completely stop the counter attack. He's fantastic in these type of situations - the do or die situations where if you don't get the ball, the opposition will score.

3) The back line is (still) a mess

Gary Neville probably has a squeaky ass from watching our mess of a back line. It's never organized and we have players dropping back unnecessarily and playing opposition players onside all the time. It's not surprising given that both our left and right backs aren't really fullbacks and playing a flat line can be very uncomfortable to players who aren't used to it because it means leaving the opposition unmarked (and offside if done right).

Example 1:

Blind is playing the City player onside (I think it's Aguero here). If Blind was further forward, along the red line, that immediately takes out one passing option for the City player. I also circled Yaya Toure in blue here because with Blind this far back, the City player can just dink the ball over the top for Yaya Toure to run onto (via the blue arrow) and Toure doesn't have to worry about being offside so he can just sprint forward. You don't want someone with the pace and power of Toure running onto the ball this way, even if it is Smalling and he has nice pace and power as well. We got lucky here as the City player passed it  out wide.

Example 2:

This again is a defensive line miscommunication. Smalling (circled in blue) steps up to play the City player offside here but Blind (circled in red), doesn't step up and plays the City player onside. De Gea ends up rushing forward to clear the ball here. 

I'm not sure that Smalling should have stepped up - I think he stepped up a little late but as a full back, Blind should be looking at his center back and stepping up with him. The center back leads the defensive line here and the full back shouldn't be lagging behind. It's not like Blind was able to cover for Smalling be staying back here as he's on the wrong side of the City player that he's playing onside. 

Example 3:

City are counter attacking him and Blind is sprinting back to cover his man (Aguero). The problem here is that he continues his sprint back behind our center backs. The black dotted line shows our defensive line according to our center backs and you see Blind is behind it thus ruining the line (I know it's not a very straight line but you get the point). 

All Blind had to do here was to stop running as soon as he reached our defensive line and it would have forced Aguero to stop running as well. 

I also circled Smalling here in blue because you can see he immediately realizes that Blind is about to ruin their line and you see he already turned back to retreat and cover for every one. That was a really good read on the situation and required very fast thinking, great job Smalling. 

There's a lot more examples of our back line not being disciplined. It might seem like Blind is the only weak link since he's the subject of my examples but a lot of them were due to Valencia - just remember that I promised not to write more about Valencia :) My guess is that Blind doesn't feel comfortable playing the offside trap/high line because he's probably the slowest defender out of the four on the pitch.

4) One fault of Carrick

Just know that I'm one of Carrick's biggest fans and the Scholes/Carrick midfield pairing was one of my favorites, so much class there. He's definitely not perfect and I just noticed a situation during this game where one of his major weaknesses was shown.

Here, Carrick receives the ball and he basically stays rooted to the spot. He immediately starts searching for a pass but you can see here that he doesn't have a lot of easy options. Instead, he should have dribbled the ball forward somewhere along the red arrow as there was a big gap in that middle space for him to dribble into. It would have opened up options for him and pulled City players out of position.

This was something that I remember Roy Keane was really good at doing. Darren Fletcher at his best was also pretty good at doing this. Herrera is also good at exploiting gaps by dribbling into them. Even when he was younger, Carrick just lacked the forward drive and mobility that a complete central midfielder needs, hence why he's much better as a deep lying playmaker. 

5) Some Rooney mistakes/faults

Remember all those posts about Rooney's mistakes when he was playing in midfield? I think he's doing a great job as a striker for us but again, he's not perfect. He lacks a certain creativity and trickiness that players like Mata has and often tends to go for the most obvious pass. 

Here, he makes the obvious pass out wide to Valencia along the blue arrow but the better pass that would have resulted in a high chance of scoring would have been a reverse pass to Fellaini along the red arrow. The black arrow shows the direction Fellaini and Valencia are running - Fellaini is running towards the opposition goal and a pass to him would likely have resulted in Fellaini shooting at goal while Valencia is running straight forward it would likely result in a cross. 

The thing is, Rooney is perfectly capable and has the awareness of making that reverse pass to Fellaini. Here's Mata's goal below - it's a very similar situation as Rooney is facing right but in this case, there's no one there this time so he's forced to reverse it to Mata who ends up scoring. 

Another mistake

Rooney has matured a lot and he's turning out to be a great captain but he squandered an opportunity here by arguing with the referee. He was fouled and instead of getting on with it and running forward, he had a few words with the referee first.

This is when he gets fouled and he's on the ground, notice the time says 51:01.

Here, he just stops arguing with the referee and starts focusing back on the game. He realizes that Mata is about to get the ball. Look at the referee's body language versus Rooney's - the referee is ready to sprint forward because he realizes that we're about to attack while Rooney isn't ready to sprint forward yet. 

Mata now has the ball and the problem is that he has no one in front of him to pass to now. If Rooney wasn't arguing with the referee (who likely just waited to play advantage for the foul on Rooney), he would have been in the blue circled area for Mata to make a through pass to. 

Notice how City's left back is lagging behind? That gap between the left back and City's center backs is the perfect area for a striker to exploit. That's only about 5-10 yards further forward than Rooney is in this picture and Rooney could have easily covered that distance in the time he spent arguing.

 Conclusion

Thanks for reading, great weekend this week! I think our midfield and attack is very good but our defense needs a lot of work. I really want Shaw to come back and we really need a proper right back (or Rafael to start playing and not get injured). Things are looking good for us, lets keep up this great form!