Unai Emery

[Risso]

The Fulham guy is the owner of the club who also owns a wrestling company, which is why he’s depicted as he is. Unai looks like he’s flying towards the league trophy, so perhaps he’s shown as trying to take it from Guardiola. Maybe a trapeze artist or something hence ‘flying high’? Dunno. Definitely not Superman or Dracula though.

[Ads]

I like that Arteta has Lego hands, the Lego haired ******.

[LeeB]

I like that Arteta has Lego hands, the Lego haired ******.

He's unrelenting on Arteta, he clearly dislikes him as much as any right thinking person would.

[Smirker]

Can't believe I wanted Pochettino over him.

[Dogtanian]

Can't believe I wanted Pochettino over him.

 

[Meanwood Villa]

Poch was my preference at the time too but once we got Unai I read his wiki page and was very impressed. My line at the time was that it was the best appointment we could have made on paper but who knows how it would work out on the pitch. Thankfully it's been alright.

[N'ZMAV]

I like that Arteta has Lego hands, the Lego haired ******.

He's unrelenting on Arteta, he clearly dislikes him as much as any right thinking person would.

I can't stand the moron.

[Bad English]

The Fulham guy is the owner of the club who also owns a wrestling company, which is why he’s depicted as he is. Unai looks like he’s flying towards the league trophy, so perhaps he’s shown as trying to take it from Guardiola. Maybe a trapeze artist or something hence ‘flying high’? Dunno. Definitely not Superman or Dracula though.

In my defence I was having a Donald J when I posted it and didn't really give the whole cartoon a full critical appraisal.

D-  See myself.

[Diablo]

I'm lovin' the elephant in the room that Pep is sat on with the lawyers and boxes of paperwork in front of it lol

[jwarry]

In today’s Times

Despite losing to Mikel Arteta’s side, Aston Villa’s intelligent use of positioning in build-up play and pressing when out of possession showed how to make them vulnerable
 
Hamzah Khalique-Loonat

One of the beautiful things about problem-solving in football is that there is never only one correct way to solve a problem. In fact, it could be argued the only correct way is the one that suits your team best.
In last week’s The Trend, we looked at how teams are increasingly defending or pressing with a 4-4-2 or 4-2-4, and the problems that can cause for either team in a match.

One of the teams we didn’t focus on was Arsenal, who are arguably the best team in the league at pressing and defending. In their match against Aston Villa on Saturday, Unai Emery’s side used a different shape to their usual one when building up, and surprised Mikel Arteta’s Arsenal with some astute tactical changes. In doing so, Emery showed there are more ways to get the better of the 4-2-4 than you may think, even against the league’s finest.
Last season Villa, like many other teams in the Premier League, built with a 3-2 shape from the back. But on Saturday, they used a 2-2.

It may seem counterintuitive to build with four outfielders in the first phase of play, rather than five. But building out from the back and around/through an opponent’s press is not just about numbers, it’s about spacing too. The centre backs, Pau Torres and Ezri Konsa, split and moved wide, and Emiliano Martínez, as shown in the image, below, took up a proactive position between them:

The deep and wide positions of the centre backs meant that if Arsenal attempted to man-mark them when Martínez had the ball, they would have been spread out thinly. And while Arsenal wanted to press high and win the ball, they definitely did not want to leave the middle of the pitch open
for Villa to play through.

This posed a problem for the forwards: they could jump out and press the ball, but if they did, the team would lose its compactness. And this was a problem compounded by those other two players we are yet to discuss: the double-pivot pairing of Amadou Onana and Youri Tielemans.

The Villa midfielders took up narrow positions and dropped deep to offer short-passing options for either Martínez or the centre backs. Villa used “third-man combinations” smartly — the centre backs would pass to the centre midfielders, and then the centre midfielder would slip the ball out of pressure into the third man, the full back; in this case, Matty Cash:

All of this was designed to pull Arsenal forward and create space for Morgan Rogers, the dynamic dribbler who has impressed for England Under-21 and may just be in consideration for the senior side come next month’s international fixtures.

Rogers would move into the half-spaces, either side of the midfielders, and offer to receive the ball. Or, he would drift into the spaces vacated by his team-mate, Onana, while Arsenal’s midfielders were adjusting to Onana dropping deeper, as he did here:

Rogers had the most progressive carries of any player, and the most dribbles too: he completed five of his seven attempted take-ons.  Only three players — Konsa, Tielemans and Torres — had more touches than him, and he played a critical role in moving the ball from the defensive or middle third into the final third, and even the penalty area.  Villa pulled the Arsenal forwards and midfielders around so that Rogers would have space to
attack. Rogers’s directness, speed and sharpness with the ball at his feet meant he was able to evade pressure and turn what looked like innocuous phases of possession in Villa’s defensive third into promising breaks in just a moment or two.

In addition to using a 2-2 structure throughout the match, Villa’s full backs would drop deep and support, creating a 2-4 or a 4-2 shape at the back as Arsenal pressed.  With those six outfielders and Martínez at the back, Villa had a 7 v 4 match-up in their defensive third, which meant they should have had three spare men.
The nature of Arsenal’s pressing, which split the pitch and forced Villa to one side, meant they were not always able to access all of these spare players, but they usually had one. In this case it’s Lucas Digne, on the left:
Villa also used that same 4-2-4 shape when they were without possession, detailed last week, but rather than pressing high and aggressively, they sat into a mid-block, around halfway, bided their time and looked for pressing triggers, like this pass from William Saliba into Ben White. At the point White receives the ball, John McGinn is already closing him down, attempting to push the ball back towards Saliba. Once White obliges, the Villa team-mates follow suit and jump forward.

Saliba subsequently passes the ball over to Gabriel, but this is where things get a bit interesting. Because Arsenal’s left back, Jurrien Timber, has taken up an inverted position in midfield, Arsenal don’t have a player in the conventional left-back area. When Gabriel receives the ball under pressure, he immediately opens his body up so that he can pass into that left-back area, but Timber is still trying to get into position, and Leon Bailey is closing in on Gabriel, fast.

The defender dallies and tries to shield the ball but is dispossessed, allowing Rogers to win the ball and pass to Ollie Watkins, who spurns a great chance. By making tweaks to their build-up and shape without the ball, Villa were able to put Arsenal into some difficult positions and attack them in a way that few teams have been able to over the past year or so. Specifically, by springing a press on one side of the pitch, and funnelling play to the other side, before the full back has time to move out of his inverted position, Villa demonstrated a weakness to the 3-2 build-up shape with inverted full backs that has become popular across Europe.

But it’s also worth noting that how a team build up in their defensive third is not dependent just on how the opposition press, and that it can often relate to how the opposing team structure their defence. For example, over the past few weeks the Chelsea head coach, Enzo Maresca, has tended to use a 3-2 build-up shape, because it allows him to have five players further upfield across the wings, half-spaces and central channel of the pitch, and creates plenty of angles for passes.

However, when his team played the Italian champions, Inter Milan, in pre-season, they used a 3-1 shape, so they could have a player further upfield. That tactical change was made because Inter Milan play with wingbacks and defend with five players in their defensive line, and a 3-2-5 shape will not create overloads in the attacking third against a team that is in a 5-3-2 shape. It was the same principle used by Emery, and while his team may have lost this weekend, the tactical acuity and shrewdness he showed, will have other managers taking notes.
  

[eamonn]

Interesting. Is it just me or does Arteta like to get a dig in about how we play? On Saturday he said he was surprised how defensive we were and I think he said something similar last season.

[Hookeysmith]

Who gives a toss what the Milk Tray man has to say?

[Duncan Shaw]

All of this is very well, but we still lost 0-2!

[Sexual Ealing]

All of this is very well, but we still lost 0-2!

Yep, lots of words written about how tactically innovative it is, which is fine, but it didn't actually work!

[CT Villan]

If Ollie had scored either of his big chances we would likely have won and people would be celebrating Unai's tactics. It wasn't the tactics that failed, it was individual error (Ollie and Emi) that cost us.