There’s a difference between being negative and being realistic. Andy Reid would have been shite at protecting the back 4 the other night. With France playing 3 attackers and controlling possession, it doesn’t make sense to play a guy like Reid in the middle of the park - particularly when he’s not that good at playing there.
It’s a little embarrassing having to explain this to you but away goals are worth more. There have been so many naive teams over the years who have pushed on in home legs looking to redeem the scoreline and grab a late goal when caught by a sucker punch that kills the tie. We aren’t good enough to dominate France and if we’re to take a risk against them then it makes absolute sense to take that risk in the away leg when our goals are worth more.
It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that playing a more attacking style is accompanied by a greater risk of conceding a goal. If we concede an early goal tonight then we’re in huge trouble but if we’d conceded that goal late on Saturday then we may as well have not travelled to Paris.
I understand the point you’re trying to make, it’s just that it’s a little simplistic and naive - oh we better attack so that if we score at home and win away then we’ll go through. Some of us are looking at it a tad more realistically and saying that if we do need to go more aggressive at any stage then it makes far, far more sense to do that in Paris. It’s not any easier to score in Croke Park.
Obviously we’re not relying on these strokes of luck. You are forgetting the facts though becasue you have your mind made up already. Try and think these things through afresh every now and again it will do you no harm. We’ve been quite good away from home in this campaign, better than at home, and against popular wisdom we’ve actually been quite good when we’ve been chasing the game. You can argue about luck or whatever playing a part but we should have nothing to fear in going to Paris.
[quote=“KIB man”]In terms of what we control, we still look dangerous from set pieces but I think the ball needs to be whipped in better something Reid and Hunt do. Duff certaintly needs to give more. He hopefully cant be as ineffective again. I’d argue that O’Shea should push forward more and Andrews also. I’d prefer if Lawrence/Mcgeady tucked in more to give us more numbers in the centre. Initially i would drop Robbie Keane deeper like in Bari. He looked sharp on the ball last Saturday so get him onto it early. Instead of hoofing the ball aimlessly if we are forced to play it long can we hit diagonal balls behind their full backs. Get them turning.
Come on Ireland.[/quote]
Duff wasn’t great the other night, but he wasn’t bad and was certainly more effective than Lawrence going forward. Unfortunately we didn’t really have bodies in the box and in fairness to Lawrence that was something he did really well, he got into the box for two or three crosses and had his chance as well.
I’m not really sure what you’re arguing for tactically here at all. You want Lawrence to tuck in more centrally but then you’re advocating hitting long balls behind their full backs in spite of bringing the wingers out of there. We were quite good at isolating the Italian centre halves in the last game with balls into the channels but the important points were that the wingers had to stay wide to keep their full backs marking - if Lawrence moves into the centre of the park then Evra will just stand unmarked at left back and to be honest a diagonal ball isn’t going to cause him any problems no matter how much you want to avoid using the term “hoof.”
Keeping Lawrence wide on Evra and using O’Shea to play a ball over both of them into the corner (not a diagonal but doesn’t have to be) gives Doyle a change to drag Gallas out of the centre. Then you’ve got Keane versus one centre half in the middle, Gallas will feel exposed and you’ve a chance at winning a free kick or just whipping it in to Keane where he’s not outnumbered.
Don’t think we want Keane playing too deep either. There’s not much value in giving him the ball deep if there’s nobody ahead of him and the midfield aren’t really going to get forward. We simply can’t afford to have Andrews getting ahead of the ball the whole time, they’ll kill us passing it around Whelan with their three midfielders. Part of the sacrifice we need to make in combatting their central trio is acknowledging that we can’t be cavalier with our two central players. It’s frustrating for our pairing but they need to be disciplined. If we can keep that as 2v3 and achieve any sort of parity then we’ll have advantages elsewhere.
We won’t be initially setup to exploit those advantages. We’re really ending up with a situation where we have a surplus out wide but for the early part of the game we’re very unlikely to force that because we need the full backs to stay deep and watch Henry and Anelka. As the game goes on we can try and push those on a bit more but for the start we’re relying on getting our strikers in good matchups in advanced areas and asking our wingers to get past the full backs as often as possible. Let the full backs and centre of the park wait until 70 minutes, then attack like fuck.
I should really charge for this level of in-depth analysis.
Cmon to fuck Ireland.
:barcasmile: