These teams we struggle to break down are just sitting deep. Early season it was to counter Jones so as not to give him the space to knock it round his marker and run after it but I think everyone now knows how deep our central midfield sit so the teams who are happy with a point against us are now also doing it to further stretch the gap between our already defensive central midfield and the strikers. There's a few of consequences to that:
* There's no room to get in behind the defence and drop a ball over the top (although it doesn't stop Doyle trying it 4 or 5 times a game!). Last time I remember us managing that was Swindon who had started very high up the pitch and after Biamou got in twice in 5 minutes they soon dropped deeper.
* Our midfield very rarely run beyond our strikers - it's a key element missing from our game all season. Doyle's done it once and scored but most of the time we're just too deep to do it.
* Jones gets the ball very high up the pitch and that means Grimmer doesn't actually get past him very often to take a man away as he's got to cover the whole pitch just to get there. There's no midfield inside to pass to either as they're miles back and so we've had this repetitive situation in every game where his 3 options are try and beat two men, shoot from 20-25 yards or knock the ball back 15 yards to Grimmer which slows the whole attack down as it usually means the ball going back across the back 4. Jones has almost become a victim of his own success this season now too - his decision making of when to pass, dribble or shoot is quite poor recently, like he feels he has to do something amazing every time he gets the ball.
* Our attacks all get squashed up on the top of the box with nowhere to go and so often the ball is cut back for a long shot.
I've linked it a couple of times before (apologies to all for that) but this red empty oval is 90% of our attacking problems.
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MR did an awesome job getting the squad together early and on longer contracts and I genuinely believe the recruitment has been excellent, including strikers. He's clearly instilled a good team spirit too. We're doing ok on the pitch as well - defence is tight, we've had some good victories against the better teams who have attacked us and given us a little more space but we've dropped a lot of points now against lower league defensive teams or teams who sit deep after scoring an early goal. There's still loads of time to go in the season but what is concerning me is not so much the points we've dropped, our position in the league or how the teams around us are doing but that so far we've just done the same thing all season, whoever we're playing, home or away. Any personnel changes have been as a result of injuries and we're not showing any adaptability to situations either proactively or reactively other than pushing Kelly higher after high time. My worry with it is that this stubborness will cost us over the course of the season - the fine margins between autos and playoffs, and I'm increasingly worried that MR isn't showing willing to make the tweaks which are clearly needed against negative teams.
