The Fulham game - First Touch and 4-3-3

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The game against Fulham had three phases/faces.

1. The home team is pumped, full of confidence and determination, and not yet tired
2. The home team has done its best, starting to get a bit tired and the away team is no longer “shell shocked”.
3. The home team scores and get some hopes back while the away team is getting nervous.

A pretty ordinary premiership scenario especially if the home team is something of an underdog.
Why am I dwelling on such a trivial matter then?

Because I think that it tell us a lot about what we may be seeing against stronger sides!

During that first phase we had little or no possession and when we did get the ball we treated it like it was red hot.
Fulham didn’t give our players much time before being all over them, and this pressure made our West Ham players either deliver a panic pass or see the ball getting stolen.

Two things were more obvious than other in this initial part of the game.

First, the first touch of many of our players is below par.
This is quite disastrous when being under pressure. The time between the first touch and when the ball is actually under control must be next to nothing since it won’t be long before you are being tackled (this is the "wellcome to Premiere League" situation we love when foreign players firts get this treatment). If that first vital moment is used by waiting for the ball to come down from the beautiful arc it’s doing after a poor fist touch, there will be no time left to decide what to do with it. This was obvious again and again.
Several players suffer from this but for a playmaker and a target player, both getting lots of passes, and must be expected to be under a lot of pressure, this is more obvious as well as more punishing than for other players.

Secondly, the 4-3-3 system, played as “firmly” as it did against Fulham showed its worst side during this period. We were simply outnumbered in the midfield giving their mid 4 an easy task of hunting our midfielders down, not giving them much of a chance to do anything useful with the ball.
This also strongly auguments the first touch problem since in this system there will always be an enemy midfielder close by and your fellow midfielders will be covered or under pressure themselves, leaving you few options and little time.
It also makes it quite hard to get the ball back when you lose it (and if the referee doesn’t allow the kind of tackles Parker is famous for, those three midfield players are in for a very difficult time).
Against a Fulham team without luck you may get away with it, but against better teams we will not.
Teams contesting for a top 10 place will have better skill on the ball and better pace and stamina in the midfield than Fulham does and that’s bad news.

After 7 minutes of the game I was certain that the 433 would, voluntarily or not, in effect turn into 451. This is the beauty – or the trap – with this system, depending on what players you have in the team and the ability of these players to adopt to a situation.
Well, that didn’t happen. The midfield (i.e. Parker) didn’t get much help from Etherington or Di Michele. Who were obviously ordered not to fall back no matter what.

After 35 minutes, and 6 or 7 very good Fulham chances (most blown by Zamora, reminding us why we sometimes had doubts about him), the 433 system started to be right for the situation.
Our midfielders started to have the time they needed to do something useful with the ball since the Fulham players were getting tired, and Etheringtons position and activity started to pay off. Now he was in a more offensive starting position, than he would have been if he had fallen back to that 451 position, when starting his raids, making them more effective.


What is the moral of this then?
Given the players in our team, I think this system must be more flexible if it is to be successful. This may evolve as the players get more accustomed to it, maybe giving it a future. Otherwise we will be butchered by sides with a good midfield!
It also emphasizes the need for a playmaker with a slightly defensive inclination (Parker again), since it will be hard to fit a Mullins type player in it, but if Parker is sidelined Noble is not yet ready.
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