T’Rovers | Page 6 | Vital Football

T’Rovers

King, that’s a decent summary of the game. However, I don’t agree that there was any change in the manager’s mindset from being ‘negative and cowardly’ to ‘brave old Cook’. I wonder whether a lot of people just see it that way so that it fits with their own narrative.

It’s funny how when we are on a losing streak Cook is being all negative and scared to attack but we win and suddenly it’s because he did what we all said he should be doing and went for it. The reality is that the team were set up no more positively on Wednesday than we were on Saturday. In fact, in the first half on Saturday we were arguably better than we were in the first half against Blackburn. The only difference was that we didn’t put the ball in the back of the net against Reading and because we didn’t the game fizzled out. When we scored on Wednesday suddenly the confidence came flooding back and we looked like our old selves.

That’s the difference, confidence, form, something just clicks and suddenly the players find that extra yard and the sharpness in their passing comes back and they want the ball again and players get forward and aren’t worried about leaving gaps at the back anymore. I’m not doing Cook down here by saying he didn’t make any amazing tactical decisions, yes he tinkered with things a bit (switching Roberts & Byrne) but he didn’t suddenly say “let’s throw everybody forwards”. He didn’t make Vaughan suddenly win everything in the air nor did he make Windass have his best game for us or turn Morsy back into the player he was last season.

A couple of weeks ago Naismith and Windass weren’t fit to burn but now we’ve seen that with a bit of confidence and a run in the team they aren’t as bad as some people think. Same with Robinson, he went from being the best thing since sliced bread to not fit to wear the shirt in a matter of weeks. He’s a young lad on a bad run of form, that’s all.

I get what you’re saying about how he made a more positive substitution by bringing Macmanaman on but the difference was we were 2-0 up. It’s easy to bring on a flair player at that point when the momentum was with us and we were looking a threat. To counter that he did actually bring on Connolly as well, at the same time, to try and protect the lead.

Rather than changing his methods Cook, to his credit, has stuck with things and has had faith in the players to turn it around, which is what they’ve done. If you listen to the official podcast a couple of the players mention that he’s had them doing extra training and they have trained harder than they ever have and Cook has reminded them about what made them a good team in the first place.

Cook has resisted the calls to go for it and throw caution to the wind and I think he’s been right to do so. I don’t think he’s been overly negative he’s just been trying to find the right balance whilst having his main front 4 out, with the injuries mounting up and with us playing all of the top four over the course of this run. Over the last few weeks we’ve had players out of form, with no confidence, who have hardly played this year, making individual errors but people want us to throw caution to the wind and go for it. Football doesn’t work like that and we’d have been smashed 4 or 5 nil a couple of times. Even the great managers don’t play themselves out of a bad run that way.

While confidence, mistakes and form plus quality of opposition play a massive part there were was a noticeable change in tactics from the start of our season to the games during our difficult run.

Specifically
- On goal kicks the centre backs used to pulled wide, Morsy and Evans came deep centrally and the full backs pushed wider and higher to give us little triangles to play the ball out from the keeper. During the bad run the centre backs still went wide but Morsy and Evans and the full backs all went to the half way line to seemingly get set to battle for long balls knocked down and it meant the centre backs had no way to play the ball out on the deck. Resulting in more long balls.

- the high press which effectivly forced opposition centre backs to long ball it under pressire stopped and we allowed the opposition more time and space until they got much higher up the pitch before we pressed as hard which gave them more options on the ball and allowed them to play it out.

- the full backs stopped overlapping as much at our best our full backs were so aggressive they were like wingers. They seemed more worried about gaps behind them than earlier and with no natural wingers we lose all our width.

- we switched to more of a flat 4-4-2 with a narrow midfield rather than 4-2-3-1, this effective switch from 4 to 3 layers made it harder to play in between the opposition lines and easier for the opposition to play through us.

- the attack mid stopped making runs to support the strikers and it left the forward line isolated. Likely as they didnt believe we'd win the long balls and were afraid of the counter.

At the start of the season we were fearless we were so aggressive at pushing forward we left ourselves open at the back. We were the no 1 team in the league for chance creation, free scoring and conceeding loads. Clearly we decided to sacrifice some of that attacking to tighten upat the back to reduce risk of the counter which was fair enough. But we miscalculated and lost the balance and went too far in the other direction. We appeared to became so worried about getting hit on the counter that we massively reduced our attacking play and the minor tweaks to the style mentioned above had a significant negative impact.
 
Personally, I'd put the poor run/form down to:
- Windass missed the penalty at Millwall
- We then lost
- In following games, we didn't take our chances
- The more we lost, the more the players lost confidence
- and the more we struggled the more the fans got on the backs of the players.

I don't think tactics or formation have changed much ........ not deliberately, anyway.