Southampton - Manchester United

Wow, that was a crazy game with a crazy ending, was the type of game I imagined Liverpool would have been. 

Hope Shaw has a good and fast recovery, it sucks because he's such a young kid and having such a great season. We're going to miss him quite a bit. Martial is looking fantastic and I can't wait to watch him play more, feels great to have a proper striker play for us. 

1) Bad positioning, mostly by Martial

I actually missed the first goal against us because I was quickly writing down my criticism of Martial's bad defensive positioning. Unfortunately, his mistake indirectly led to the goal.

Here, the Southampton center back is bringing out the ball. Martial, circled in red, should be the one closing him down - he's our only center forward. Memphis, circled in blue, should be staying on the left. Additionally, for some reason, Schneiderlin, circled in black, got over excited and rushed forward to close down the Southampton players. You can see in this picture that he's in a really bad position - he's not close to another of the Southampton players.





















Instead, Memphis ends up running centrally to close down the Southampton player while Martial stays out wide. Except since he's running from out wide, he's more or less behind the Southampton player already and he's just chasing him from behind which is useless. The Southampton center back managed to dribble it all the way along the red arrow easily.

Now, below, I circled Schneiderlin in red. If he didn't initially run forward out of position, he would have been further back, around where the red arrow is pointing. He would have either been able to stop the run or intercept the following pass.

All this would have been avoided if Martial had just closed down the center back like a forward is supposed to. It's still a pretty bad mistake from Schneiderlin too and he should be more disciplined as he's an experienced player. 

2) Missing Shaw

I thought Rojo was okay considering it's his first time playing in a while and he's not really a left back either. However, he had so many bad passes forward and lost the ball so much for us, was definitely much better defensively.

This example below was so frustrating. This is right after Southampton's goal, at kick off. Look at the time, it's 13:34.



We're passing it really nicely around the pitch, basically looking for holes in their defense and testing them out - exactly how LVG wants us to play. Look at the time - it's 14:53. We've had the ball for over a minute and I counted 28 passes from us. Except now the ball gets to Rojo, who isn't really under a lot of pressure.

The result: awful long pass right to Southampton's keeper.

Very frustrating to have the entire team be passing well and then see your teammate just blast off a terrible pass for no reason.

3) Depay has to deal with a lot

Depay gets a lot of criticism for not doing enough but I think he's having a pretty decent season (of course, can always be better). The problem with him is that we play with a slow build up so by the time he gets the ball, the defense is ready to defend against him and he usually has to beat at least two or more players in order to make anything happen.

Just wanted to show this picture - look at how many defenders are concentrated on Depay. He actually manages to find the one gap/option he has and he passes the ball to Martial (blue arrow) for Martial to get a clean shot at goal.

Just the fact that he's attracting that many opposition players is more than enough. It's his responsibility to find a teammate to pass it to when something like this happens (which he does here) and it's his teammates' responsibility to run into an open space for him to pass to when this happens (which Martial does, can't say the same for Rooney). 

4) Bad concentration

This was such a bad play that I had to use the same picture twice (more or less) to show all the mistakes.

Here, Carrick and Smalling (blue arrows) have their arms raised, asking for a foul. Do you see the Southampton players stopping? No, they're sprinting and Carrick and Smalling should be focusing on the play, not on the referee. It's especially annoying because Carrick and Smalling are our senior players and our leaders so they should be the ones who never lose focus like this.

Another mistake here - I circled Schneiderlin and Carrick in red. Why are they so close to each other? They look like they're marking each other, as opposed to marking the Southampton players (that's Blind trying to defend against both of them by himself).





















This brings me to my next point. Below is more or less the same instance. Carrick (or Schneiderlin, doesn't matter since they're right next to each other), should have dropped back into the center back role once Blind came forward to mark the players on the ball. This would have allowed Smalling and Darmian to shift a little bit to our right so they can defend a long cross to far post.

5) Awful back pass

This just should not happen. A U16 player who get yelled at for this.

We're defending and we get the ball back, one of our players pass it forward to Rooney here. He has no one marking him, plenty of space. Also note the time - it's 46:10 and there's a minute of stoppage time, the ref is about to end the half. Rooney can just clear it out wide and the ref will likely whistle for the half. Or he can just turn around and dribble it forward (blue arrow). Neither of those options are hard.





















Instead, this happens - he kicks back a high pass in the air to our center backs. Just look at how dangerous this looks.

6) Great play by Schweinsteiger

This led to our third goal. I'm sure you've read the reports and seen the videos on how this was a perfect LVG style goal but I really wanted to point out one thing - that it was Schweinsteiger who made the difference.

Below, Schweinsteiger has the ball and he has two options. The first, the red arrow, is the easy pass out wide. If he makes that pass, it's a good decision and he won't ever get criticised for it. Instead, he takes the harder but better option and sneaks a pass along the blue arrow to Memphis which ultimately leads to Mata's goal. You can see it's a difficult pass and he didn't have to make it - he could have chose the easy route.

In my opinion, that's what LVG wants from our players. Instead of forcing an attack, we pass it around until we see a small opening and then we take advantage of it. The problem is that a lot of our players end up just passing it around and never taking advantage of the small openings that come up because they're afraid to lose the ball.

7) Space on the right again

This below is way too much space and time to allow a Southampton player to have in our half. You don't see Memphis with this kind of space. Schneiderlin, circled in red or Mata, circled in blue, should have been much closer to him. It doesn't particularly matter which one of them is closer, that depends on the context of the situation. It just matters that one of them is there.

I think the problem here is that LVG clearly tells Mata to drift centrally but when Mata drifts centrally, one of our central midfielders need drift to the right to cover the gap Mata leaves on the right.

8) Another Mata tracking mistake

I've shown this mistake in almost every single post this season and it worries me that I keep seeing this.

So far so good below. Mata is tracking his player. 

Here, Mata for some reason just stops running while the player he is tracking continues running. Can't see it in a picture, but its so weird that Mata stops running - it almost looks like he ran into an invisible wall. 

Here's the result, Mata has lost his man and now Smalling his to come out wide to cover for him. That leaves Blind alone in the center against a much taller and stronger player.

Final thoughts

I thought we played well for about 30-40 minutes and the rest of it was very poor, not very satisfied with our performance despite the win. Southampton had a lot of energy in the first half and we couldn't really handle them. It's a little annoying because it seems our players are content with just passing it around until we're a goal then and only then do they look to create something.

I also thought Valencia played very well. I'm not the biggest fan of him at right back but for this game, he did very well. Rooney is still looking very poor and pretty much had nothing to do with any of our goals. It's a little sad to see that we can buy a 19 year old striker and have him immediately start scoring in a position that Rooney still can't score in yet. 

Next week at home against Sunderland should be good, should be an easier game although it's a game that we can't lose.

Thanks for reading!