It's a well thought through post, which deserves a better response than I suspect Kompany had little choice but to use Costelloe because of Jay Rod's injury.Spiral wrote: ↑Sat Jul 30, 2022 6:42 pmAt the risk of sounding like a crazy person denying the evidence in front of my eyes, even though Costelloe's average position was far out wide I'm still not totally sold on this being a deliberate 4231, and I think what we saw is totally consistent with a 4222 setup. I know that sounds ridiculous looking at average positions, but I'd make the argument that a box formation authorises Costelloe to use the space he found out wide for reasons outlined a bit further up the thread. I think there's a valuable distinction to be made between in-game positioning and the setup of a system, because a setup implies certain duties and positional expectations for individual players in accord with the roles they're given within that system, and those roles, when done right, are apparent. I think as fans it's useful for us to intelligently understand what's being attempted, because this will inform our judgements as to how well we're playing as a team, and the performance of individual players, and if we start from a position of fundamentally misunderstanding what is being attempted, we run the risk of demanding things from players they aren't expected to do. Essentially, clarity makes us better critics. I stand to be corrected about everything I'm posting, and quite obviously I defer to the manager and coaches and players, so rather than looking at this in terms of declarative statements, for me it's about interpretation. So then, to defy what I see with my own eyeballs...
edited for brevity
You may have a point but quite how VK intends the 4-2-2-2 to work we shall see through the season.