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Wonder how successful Pulis and Allardyce would be in the VAR era.
Stoutly defending your penalty box maybe not the best tactic when VAR now picks up every time a ball hits a players arms/hands, every bit of holding, shirt pulling and contact that can lead to penalties.
I'm not saying that Pulis and Allardyces' teams indulged more in these activities, but they tended to spend more time defending the penalty area.
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Not sure how many of you dared to watch last night's MoTD. I watched - it was literally the first football program I've watched all season, simply for the oddment of watching Liverpool and United getting twatted.
Anyway, the point is, during the United match, at one point the commentator said something like "I don't know what's happened to defending this season, but I'm loving it."
My response to Junior who was watching with me was "Yeah, it's been dumbed down. He's loving it because it's abysmal."
As others have said, no one but the hardcore really want to see a Pulis back-nine in weekly operation, but bloody hell, there's got to be some balance, surely.
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I have been saying this for years.
A great example of it is the fact Van Djik is revered as one of the all time great defenders at the moment. He's a very very good player, of course, but he doesn't even scrape the top 50 of all time - yet at the moment could you name anybody to rival him?
I hate that so many games finish with these silly score lines these days. It seems VAR and empty stadiums are leading to even more of this.
I'd also said at the start of the summer our defence was the big issue that needed to addressing to give us a chance in the top flight and that's proving to be true.
I am looking forward to things tactically evening up a bit. Yes 0-0 is boring but much better that you get a tight 2-1 game with some excellent defending than a bunch of school boy slip ups leading to 6-1's. The game itself is the entertainment not watching people tap into empty nets due to incompetent defenders.
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Teams cannot defend set pieces, this is the big one for me. Before we've looked at trying to play out, holding a high line etc.
I don't want a return to the Pulis days but even on a limited budget like ours, if you can focus on making the most of defending and attacking set pieces and being bloody hard to beat then you'll stop up comfortably. We are simply way too open.
For the past two seasons whenever a team has got on top of us they've scored. Until we're able to ride out periods of pressure without conceding we're never going to amount to much.
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Never saw the issue in defending well, I seem to remember the ground rocking when we played man city few years ago and drew 0-0, seem to remember JT hitting the post.
Hate to say it, but have to look at how Nuno plays and sets his team out, yes they had a bad result against West Ham, but when they do he gets them back to basics and win 1-0. They sit back for 60mins then push out, no to dissimilar to Roy Hodgson but he knows the importance of clean sheets. I think his problem will be that eventually he will struggle to get big success with his style?
Pulis set us up to our strengths at the time, stopped us conceding first, (often in first few minutes), stopped giving silly free kicks away on the edge of the area and blocked out crosses..... all very simple. Still convinced if he had have got 5 or 6 players with pace who could hit on the break we may have stayed up, but the way teams are playing this year in prem its crying out for Hoofball.
Bilic really does need to make changes next game, but I dont thinks its just down to individual players.