So I ended up doing some simple things, I removed the shouts: Retain Possession, Play out of defense, short passing and added Direct passing, Whipped in crosses, hit early crosses. And they were doing this by sitting and deep and keeping the ball. My predilection for possession, geared me to starting games this way, and whilst they looked somewhat like they do in real life, they were winning a lot of games, a lot. This looked a lot like how they were playing in real life. This was a lot more realistic, and it had Koke drifting into the middle on a regular basis, Arda Turan would occasionally end up around the box or out wide and the strikers because of their PIs ended up drifting out wide pulling defenders away. And stuck to this for the vast majority of the season, and even the assistant manager started going on winning runs. We then started taking a closer look at asymmetric 442 systems. It wasn’t perfect but it was close, to how they played. The problem with this system was that it didn’t unleash Koke centrally as in bang in the middle of the pitch, he would be closer to the centre left position. This looked wider but played narrow, through the use of shouts, but having said that, we preferred to start matches holding possession, invariably causing us to win more possession, it essentially became a counter attacking possession based system against weaker sides, but fairly balanced against good sides. When I first started the season we experimented with various strike partnerships up front, settling for this system at first. Invariably they were using defensive systems. Even when I went with a direct style of passing, we still somehow managed to keep high percentages, and one common denominator was the opposing sides formation. The hardest thing to do was keeping a low percentage of possession. Essentially we have used 3 different versions of the 442, each trying to maintain the ethos of dynamism, hard work and aggression. As my experiment with replicating their 442 is coming to an end, here’s a recap.
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