General Premier League Thread 2020-21 - Mod Notes in 1st post. [Updated 17/12/20]

thebaz wrote: »

good Defending and structure are all part of any football team - but getting 9 men behind the ball (EVERY game) to see out a 0 0 is not what football is to me , hence the term anti-football

Here's a good take on it all (taken from event on the Leeds thread), a Swansea fan celebrating all that was good about a Leeds team that had just conceded 6 to Man Utd...but tried to play right up to the end. And his embarrassment at Swansea's preference for the "keep them goalless, try and nick 1" approach in the Premier League. The whole anything justifies the 3 points is really the stuff of owners, fans should want to see their team play....

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This is how this started — a tweet that I posted on Sunday evening, shortly after the final whistle blew at Old Trafford, where Manchester United put six past their bitter rivals from across the Pennines.

https://twitter.com/stujames75/status/1340730373236527104

The second sentence provided some personal context — a season spent taking my son to watch his team playing survival football in the Premier League. Swansea City’s goal tally in top-flight home games up until the end of December 2017 read: 0, 0, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1.

We went to Wembley during that time to watch Swansea play Tottenham Hotspur in the league. It finished goalless and we stood to clap the team off, along with 3,000 others in the away end. As we spilled out of the stadium that Saturday night, it crossed my mind that we had just been celebrating our team picking up a point despite the fact they didn’t register a single shot on target in 90 minutes and barely got in their opponents’ half (Spurs had 75 per cent possession).

That’s not really what I signed up for when I started traipsing all around the country with a six-year-old.

For some fans, there is nothing wrong with that: it’s results over style every time, all about the league position and a stay-up-at-all costs mentality, even if that means starting off every season in the Premier League with the sole objective of getting to 40 points by whatever means possible. Fair enough if that’s your thing – and I mean that sincerely. But it’s not why I go to football. And never will be.

I want to see my team win, like every other fan, and play at the highest level. But how they go about trying to do that also matters to me. So, while the last thing I wanted was for Swansea to be relegated in 2018, the truth is that the first season back in the Championship under Graham Potter, when the team finished 10th, was far more enjoyable than circling the plughole in the Premier League for two years, grinding out results, willing the clock to go faster on the scoreboard at Wembley, and holding up a white flag every now and again.

All of which brings me to Leeds, whose last two games have produced 78 attempts on goal in total (42 for them) and included being hit for six at Old Trafford, prompting words like “pragmatism” to be bandied about and all sorts of questions asked, including “Should Bielsa change his philosophy?” Bielsa might need to tweak his tactics to improve the Premier League’s leakiest defence, but why would a man who has been coaching for 28 years and enjoyed such a rich and distinguished career, including success at his current club, change his philosophy? Probably because we love a knee-jerk reaction to a result. “When you lose, everyone questions the style of play. When you win, you are praised for it,” Bielsa said after the Manchester United result.

There will be a few hidings along the way with Bielsa’s approach – but good luck finding a Leeds fan who says that the bad outweighs the good under his management. Leeds beat Newcastle United 5-2 last Wednesday and had 17 attempts on goal at Old Trafford four days later. Trailing 6-2, they were pushing for a third goal in second-half stoppage time, even if that left them open to conceding a seventh.

Is there nothing in between being expansive and pragmatic? Of course there is. But maybe compromising would mean that Leeds are nothing like as free-scoring on other occasions. Would they still win 3-0 at Aston Villa, put four past Fulham and score those five against Newcastle?

But this was against Manchester United, I hear you say. I can’t remember too many criticising Bielsa when Leeds took Liverpool on at Anfield on the opening day and lost 4-3.

“This team… I don’t know what they are,” said Gary Neville, the Sky Sports summariser, as Leeds passed the ball around early in the second half on Sunday. “They just basically think that they can take on every single other opponent one for one. It’s a training session that we used to do as kids, for fitness mainly, but never as a style. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant to watch.

“They’re all brave on the ball, they all take the ball, they pass to each other even when they’re marked. They all make angles, they never shirk responsibility. Every single one of them. That’s why I like them. They’re a courageous team.”

A few seconds later, Rodrigo crossed the ball from the right and Raphinha, ghosting in at the far post, forced David de Gea into a superb point-blank save that stopped Leeds getting it back to 4-2. Neville just started laughing. Later in the evening, when Match Of The Day showed the highlights, the BBC’s commentator Guy Mowbray was also chuckling. “It could easily be 10-8,” he said in the closing stages, and before Jack Harrison missed a sitter. He was right, too.

Leeds have scored 24 league goals this season, which is double Arsenal’s tally and three times as many as Burnley’s. Yes, they’re like a sieve at the other end, but this is a club four months into their first season back in the Premier League for 16 years.

Look through the 14 players who featured for them at Old Trafford and Patrick Bamford was their most experienced in the Premier League. Bamford, for the record, had started four Premier League games before this season. After Bamford, it’s Liam Cooper, whose last game at this level prior to the beginning of the season was for Hull City a decade ago.

It’s a wild ride under Bielsa and getting thumped 6-2 by the club you love to hate isn’t any supporter’s idea of a good day, but strap me in and I’ll happily buy a ticket to watch him manage my team every week. And that — buying a ticket — is something that people (pundits and a few others working in the media as well as armchair supporters) overlook at times.

The real fans — not the Twitter keyboard warriors — are paying for the pleasure to go to watch in a normal world (or paying for the pleasure to stream in my case now). For them, or for us, the match day is often an escape from the banality, or the stress, of everyday life. We wouldn’t mind being entertained now and again.

Indeed, when people wonder why some Newcastle supporters aren’t happy when their team is closer in points to the Champions League places than the relegation zone or, as was the case a couple of years ago, say that West Brom fans “should be careful what they wish for” when they got frustrated with the football under Tony Pulis, they’re missing the point.

We don’t think like pundits, we don’t think like owners and we don’t think like managers. We think like supporters.

For many of us (not everyone, of course) it’s not all about the next TV deal or trying to finish 14th in the Premier League. It’s about getting some satisfaction from watching our team for 90 minutes.

In fact, if you asked supporters of Newcastle and West Brom about their most enjoyable seasons over the last five years, my guess is that a number would probably say the one when they won promotion from the Championship. None of which is to say that they would want to go back there now.

To be clear, there’s not a right or a wrong way to play, but what I will say — and I imagine that there are fans at Premier League clubs who will relate to this — is when it’s all about the result and no importance is given to the process, you’d better keep picking up points because it’s a hard sell to supporters when you’re losing and serving up bland football.

For now, I’ll look forward to watching Leeds whenever they’re on TV, for all the reasons Neville highlighted during the game.

Some will call Bielsa’s team fearless. Some will call them naive. I’ll call it entertainment and wonder how much more fun watching Swansea would have been had Bielsa signed on the dotted line when club officials went to meet him in Argentina a few years ago

kowloonkev wrote: »

Not saying they are the same. Saying if style is so important to Everton fans then they should be unhappy because they are boring to watch and fairly negative a lot of the time. If Sam had Everton second in the league I think Everton fans wouldn't have been concerned about style, same as most fans.

But the point is...it's not second. For fans, there is a big difference between negative football to succeed, to challenge for trophies, and negative football to survive.

Fans of Atletico Madrid, Jack Charlton's Irish team etc. tolerate grim football because it's eclipsed by the pleasure of winning. But the combination of awful football with the ambition of finishing 4th last...that might please owners, but not necessarily the fans. I'd rather see Leeds relegated playing Bielsa's football than grimly hang on playing an Allardyce type of game.