Not a Footium Blog

That’s right, we’re still going on this series! Not long left to go now before we can do the final recap and show you some spreadsheets!

The Line Ups

Our Line Up

The classic 4-3-3! One of our weak areas, sadly, is our CM’s. Rodney Griffin, despite only being 29 rated, has scored some goals and contributed well, but we knew we had a bit of weakness in the team.

Average Squad Rating: 41.4

Opponent’s Line Up

It’s that spaceship looking formation happening all over again! 5-4-1, with it’s Millenium Falcon-esque outline shape.

Average Squad Rating: 40.4

This leaves us with a slight advantage! (+1.0) over our opponents.

Real Life Context

It’s 4-3-3 baby! Used by Johan Cruyff, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp; it has been around since the 70s and was one of the most revolutionary formations to ever come out of football.

This variation is the absolute classic version of the formation, with 3 CM’s, a RW and a LW.

Strengths:

• High Pressing. Sometimes called ‘heavy metal football’, it allows teams to press extremely high and badger the opponents into making a mistake.
• Possession dominance. With the midfield triangle, it allows teams with creative players to absolutely dominate the middle of the pitch.
• Flexibility. As we see with teams like Liverpool, the full backs are provided opportunities to push on, either overlapping or underlapping to create overloads on the pitch.

Weaknesses:

• Defensive frailty. If the full backs push up high, it can leave the remaining defenders exposed.
• Drain on players. Due to the need to press high, and the amount of getting up and down the pitch players will be doing, you need players with a lot of stamina!

Against such a defensive opposition, I had some worries about us being able to break down our opponents.

The Match

I would love to live in a world where we had an exciting tale to spin about this match, but sadly, we lost 3-0. We conceded our first goal in the 28th minute, and whilst our players grafted fo the rest of the match, they sadly got two more goals, in the 87th and 89th minute, leaving us with a very unflattering result.

Check out the stats below.

You can see that we struggled across all statistics, all though we did commit more fouls? I guess?

On to the next one.

See you all on the pitch!