Good result today but not a good performance. LVG says he rates our teams not only by result but by performance and by performance, it was a very poor game. Three points though and here's hoping 3-5-2 and Di Maria as a striker goes extinct.
I'm going to try to not do too much on Rooney today since I focused on him last week but also because he played so poorly I'd end up spending hours showing his mistakes. I think it was mostly a bad day for him but bad day + wrong position = disaster.
Also, sorry for the picture quality - NBC online doesn't seem to have our game up so I have to use other sources.
1) Mata had a poor game today
I felt LVG rightly subbed off Mata as he was just misplacing passes today. This picture below is about three minutes into the game and the person receiving the ball is Mata. Mata receives the ball and immediately makes a huge back pass all the way to De Gea - it was clear that was his plan the entire time as I could see him shape his body for a long back pass even before he received the ball.
You see Mata is somewhat tightly Marked but a 10 foot back pass just ahead of Carrick on the left should be relatively easy. He also has the option of first time passing it to our player on the left wing (the one at the top of the picture on the halfway line). Or just take a small tough backwards to give himself some space to turn. A lot of options but he picks the easiest one and when I saw this, I felt that it signified a lack of confidence.
2) Di Maria shoots too much
I think Di Maria is a great player and I thought he played well today when he got into deeper positions and had the chance to dribble a bit. However, he tends to go for far too many impossible long shots that never even come close to being a goal. Below is 8 minutes in and Di Maria has the ball. Just look at this picture and see if shooting makes sense at all.
End result: his shot didn't even make it past the QPR center backs...
3) Why go wide?!
I know I talked about this extensively last post already but this particular incident really annoyed me. Rooney has the ball and you can see Falcao is about 20 feet in front of him with some space. Rooney also has quite a bit of time and he's already facing goal so he has the option to dribble and drive it forward as well. Instead, he goes wide all the way to Valencia (not in the picture). The pass was unsuccessful and you find out in the next instance that Valencia was even that wide open.
4) Johnny Evans had some nice forward runs today
I wanted to give credit to Evans for having some good forward runs bringing the ball out of defense today. He used to be really great at this but recently haven't seen much of it so it was nice to see this. In the picture below, Evans has the ball and he starts dribbling.
He ends up here - he's the guy between the two QPR players close to the center of this picture. He ends up passing it to Valencia out wide, which was probably has best option.
Unfortunately (or predictably...), Valencia takes far too much time on the ball - I counted six touches and below is the screenshot of the QPR penalty area right after Valencia does his low cross-cum-shot thing. If you look at the picture above, you can count 7 QPR players and see that they're somewhat spread out but by the time Valencia tries something, they're all compact and in the box, as shown in the picture below.
Nice segway into the next point --->
5) Valencia's doesn't know how to throw the ball in properly
It's funny, I actually texted my friend a few months ago and told him that all of Valencia's throw ins are illegal and he finally gets punished for it today. To show it's not an isolated incident, here's one at 14 minutes and about 40 seconds into the game. Look at his right leg - it's raised and clearly he doesn't have both legs touching the ground when he throws the ball (that's a rule).
Below is the one 17-18 minutes in that he gets penalized for. I couldn't get a great picture as here you can see the ball is already released but looking at his body position, you can still tell there's no way his trailing leg was touching the ground. I wish I had GIFs.
Some people seem to think he was penalized to stepping too far forward or taking too long to throw it in but as you can see in the picture below, the ref even explains it, demonstrating that his trailing leg went off the ground.
Illegal throw ins seem to happen all the time in professional games and for some reason referees don't often call it even though it's the easiest call you can make. It's quite disturbing that Valencia doesn't know how to throw it in - dragging the trailing leg is a basic throw in skill that's taught early on and it becomes a habit.
Although this happens to other teams too, I partly blame the coaching staff. Evra made the same throw in mistake all the time and occasionally got punished for it as well but was never told to fix it by our coaching staff at that time.
My hypothesis is that both players (Evra and Valencia) grew up as attacking players in very professionally organized clubs and they were trained with attacking skills only so never had to learn throw ins since they're a job for defenders generally. And when they became full/wing backs professionally, since referees rarely call it, it's overlooked and everyone forgets about it. I never saw Gary Neville make this mistake that Valencia and Evra are often guilty of.
I have a few more things I want to write about that I'll update with part 2 tomorrow - it takes a while to write these up and I'm tired :)
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