QPR - Manchester United Part 2

1) We're giving other teams too much time to sit back and defend against us - we miss many counter attacking opportunities

Example 1:

At around 42 minutes into the game, Carrick makes a nice forward pass into Falcao's feet and Falcao has time to turn and dribble it a little bit. You see in this picture there's four Manchester United players and four QPR players. 

He has two QPR players in front of him and he makes a decent pass over the top to Di Maria, although maybe slightly over hit and wide. Di Maria is able to get to the ball but is forced out wide.

He dribbles it a little backwards and then passes it back to Carrick - there wasn't much else he could do. By now, there's a lot more QPR players back but it's still somewhat open and there's a few options in play here. 

End result: ball is passed back to Evans and now the entire QPR team is back in their own half and perfectly in place. We pass the ball around the ball and eventually the attack fizzles out.  

I didn't really have a huge problem with this play above as I thought that once Di Maria was forced out wide, he didn't have much of a choice but to pass back and the attacking impetus was lost but I still felt it was a good example of how we let the other team completely get set to defend our attacks rather than take advantage of a 4 on 4 situation.

Example 2

This is at the 65th minute and we're leading 1-0 so it's not the worst thing in the world that we missed a counter attacking opportunity but settling for a 1-0 lead at the 65th minute against QPR is a little pathetic.

Below, you see QPR have five players in or near the box in an attack that failed and Rooney is chasing the ball. Doing the math, there's 6 QPR players in this picture and we have 8 (including De Gea). That leaves 5 QPR players (including their goalie) defending against 3 of ours with Rooney passing to them. That's a relatively safe counter attack and considering that we have Di Maria up front who can dribble past a few players, decent chance of success.

Rooney gets to the ball and dribbles it forward, perfect.  

Except that now, he goes for the easiest pass which is to Falcao who is straight ahead of him but as you can see, Falcao's back was to goal and was tightly marked. End result: Falcao dribbles it backwards, we keep possession and we lose the chance to counter attack. 

Rooney should have gone for an outside the boot long pass to Di Maria who was running forward down the right wing area. That kind of pass should be well within Rooney's passing range and was the kind of pass we saw Scholes do all the time. 

Example 3

85th minute, QPR failed attack and Valencia has the ball in the top of the picture with space and he's already facing their goal. He also has plenty of options with the best one being diagonal forward pass to Fellaini (the player closest to him in this picture) who could then make a one time pass forward.

He ends up making yet another long pass forward to Falcao who is once again forced to play with his back to goal - counter attacking opportunity eliminated. 

End result: ball gets passed back to De Gea. 

You'll notice these examples are all in the second half after we equalized because QPR are pressing and having a go at it and we're defending more. Getting a 1-0 lead and then counter attacking is pretty much the safest way to go about it but the problem is, we're not counter attacking effectively so we end up just keeping possession to defend. In theory, that sounds okay but if you look at the picture above, you see that there's four QPR players in our 1/3rd of the pitch when the ball gets to De Gea. Without a proper counter attacking threat, the QPR players don't even have to run back to defend and they can just stay forward and press our players, making the 1-0 lead hard to defend. 

Parting words

Hope you enjoyed this week's analysis! I could write another 10 points with things I jotted down during the game but that would take forever so I tried to be more concise. Please leave comments with any suggestions on how I can improve. Hopefully the picture quality will be better next week as usually NBC keeps replays of most games online.