Geordies in decent shape shocker!

By: Martyn | September 15th, 2009

For the Italian word ‘melina’, there is no equivalent in the English language. This football-related term refers to the process usually enacted by sides holding the lead in a game and that aimless sideways passing at the back and in the midfield to waste time and draw the opposition upon you for the kill. Cardiff City, 1-0 down and thoroughly stuck behind Newcastle United’s disciplined midfield line, bizarrely attempted a bit of the melina during the first half of Sunday’s defeat. If an allegory of the gulf in class and ensuing encounter was needed, this was it. United were so comfortable in this clash between two supposed heavyweights of the division, I half expected/wished that their coaching staff would begin tossing them top-hats (no league pun position intended), coattails and sticks after instructing PA-man Ali to crack on the only Bobby Darin song anyone really knows. Saying that, they ventured forward so infrequently in the second half that they may as well have planted Fred Astaire up top. So what went wrong and how can we rectify it? Suffice to say, having spent time on YouTube looking for relevant Astaire footage for that last link, I’ll resist the bulging temptation to watch the man in action in one of his many enjoyable films to offer some answers (that are thankfully, all rather simple). Putting them into practice on the other hand…

SHAPE
Chris Hughton served his Magpies in what could loosely be defined as a 4-4-1-1. Joey Barton was semi-deployed on the left hand side of the midfield, Ryan Taylor on the right, while Danny Guthrie acted as something of an attacking midfielder. Kevin Nolan ran about in the centre like a fat kid chasing a sausage attached to his head via a length of string, whilst Alan Smith sat and acted as the motorway smash scene that causes tailbacks. This negative but versatile and centrally-heavy system saw Newcastle boss possession for large spells and stymie any sign of Bluebirds creativity. With no natural wingers in their side, Danny Simpson and Jose Enrique were able to cautiously maraud forward once or twice, while Joey Barton spent more time in the centre as Nolan ghosted into the box and Ranger propped up on the left flank (mainly with his back to goal). Although Jonas would most likely have started were he fit, his absence was actually of great benefit to his side. His energetic but often carefree positive play may have provided us with an exploitable chink in Hughton’s über-rigid set-up.

Cardiff lined up in their usual 4-4-2, with Ledley and Rae in the centre, Whittingham and Burke out wide and the Chopra/Bothroyd partnership. But with Newcastle shutting the space and sweeping everything up, City were impotent and lifeless against an overwhelmingly powerful side. The full-back pairing of Capaldi and Quinn were just that, fully back, as neither made much attempt to remedy errors made by possible ancestors in the Light Brigade and charge successfully. Likewise, any attempts our midfield players made to break through were about as effective as trying to spread margarine with a sheet of flat A4 paper.

How could Dave Jones have countered this? By matching Newcastle man-for-man in the midfield. Chopra and Bothroyd were useless, and one of these could certainly have been sacrificed to introduce Taiwo into the fray. With the combative Nigerian and Rae battling aggressively and giving our visitors an extra thing to think about in the centre, Joe Ledley and Peter Whittingham might have been granted more time on the ball and more space to play it in as a result. Unfortunately, Dave Jones isn’t one for change. Be that tone of voice, touchline pose or tactics. If ‘er indoors returns from Asda with a dopiaza instead of the usual korma because she thought it’d be nice to ‘give it a try’, I’m certain the lively Liverpudlian would develop a depleted appetite when push comes to knife and fork shovelling.

Jones’s linear approach to tactics (or tinkering with them mid-match when the default is floundering) runs in tandem with his approach to transfers; both formula’s he’s been loath to break. As Tim Springett notes in this month’s issue of When Saturday Comes: “[Jones's] claim that, on arrival at Southampton, he took over an ageing side does not stand up to scrutiny. Matt Le Tissier was, at 26, one of the older members of the team and the previous manager’s parting gift had been 20-year-old Kevin Davies. Jones, conversely, appeared to have a policy of signing players over the age of 30, who commanded high wages yet delivered little, leading to a last-day escape from relegation in 1999.”

Have I digressed? A smidgen. Yet the point I’m ultimately trying so hard to make is that with such a narrow-minded thinker at the helm, City will always be outwitted and outplayed in games of this magnitude.

TACTICS
During his spell in charge Roma, Luciano Spalletti – a manager who once brought his Udinese side to Ninian Park and suffered the indignity of conceding to Phil Mulryne – pioneered a revolutionary 4-6-0 formation. This system has far more positivity about it than perhaps initially greets the eye. Midfield interchangeability and fluidity are of course essential, along with malleable and mature personnel and a squad that has worked together for a long time. The most famous disciple of the bald and rather frightening Italian’s system may just be one Sir Alex Ferguson, his usage of it accommodating the mercurial talents of Rooney, Tevez and Ronaldo in the same team and aiding Manchester United’s Champions League triumph in Moscow.

Since then of course, many have used the idea as a blueprint for the way their teams play, and the Newcastle United we saw at the Shiny New Ground indicates that Chris Hughton is one such copycat. He has been aided by the fact that 10 of Newcastle’s starting 11 were with the club last season, and thus, his implementation of such a system has got off the ground. While Ranger fluctuated between central alignment and bothering Quinn down the channel, Nolan, Guthrie and Barton swapped positions with rhythm and meticulous precision. Ryan Taylor rendered the inclusion of Whittingham and Capaldi void, while Bothroyd’s early attempts to unsettle Alan Smith in the holding role proved futile. They were a well drilled side who looked comfortable feeding on drop-downs won aerially by Ranger, or by making us chase shadows with their intelligent possession-retaining passing. They were adept at winning set-pieces and didn’t let panic permeate their play. Nevertheless, for all of Newcastle’s positional sense and the calm radiance of them dictating, they did show a distinct lack of spark or creativity. However, they rarely squandered possession casually in key areas, and the threat they hold at set-pieces culminated in the goal that eventually saw them retreat for most of the game and thus that paucity of magic was largely inconsequential.

Cardiff’s ideas seemed to stem from anywhere but the midfield. With the cumbersome 4 (and the full-backs) looking bewildered, the work was left to the centre-backs and the strikers. The aforementioned melina ploy failed embarassingly, and the defence tended to give it 30 seconds before seeing the Graham Taylor-coloured light and lumping it forward. Annoyingly, every time the ball ended up in the proximity of Jay Bothroyd, he’d either display the worst touch of a football seen since the days of Leo Fortune-West, or flop to the ground like the Eduardo UEFA said dived. Sorry, the Eduardo that UEFA says did dive but now says didn’t! Whenever the more effective Chopra got on the end of a hoof, Newcastle would concede the tactical foul and would marshal us superbly on the resulting free-kick. Upon coming on, the now-injured Kelvin Etuhu injected power and directness but this was only in sporadic bursts. There was no pattern to our play bar these delegation punts and the occasional Chris Burke attempt at a give-and-go, and the inevitability and predictable nature of it all made watching the match an increasingly more objective process as it wore on.

The solution to countering this would first have had to encompass my earlier assertion of Dave Jones changing the formation. Failing that, the only manner in which we could have remedied the lethargic uselessness of our play was by looking to up the ratio of pass-and-moves: with particular emphasis on increasing the frequency of the latter. Ledley, Rae and Whittingham have all played and trained with one another now for a number of years. Is it too much to think that maybe there’d be some sort of better inherent understanding that sees the trio seize the initiative and try and integrate some of what they’ve found out about their colleagues during those cold December mornings and warm August afternoons with the bibs and cones? The space to work in wasn’t there, that’s for sure. Nonetheless, players like Whittingham and Ledley who are tempting Premier League clubs into parting with their cash should not be settling for shadow-chasing and resigned body language.

END-PRODUCT
The final course on ITV’s Saturday teatime television show Gladiators saw the contestants tackle an assault course named The Eliminator. This offered your Gary’s from Grimsby the chance of ostentatiously letting their glory manifest itself at the climax with a Tarzan-style rope-swing through the breakable plastic sheet that looked like a burnt potato waffle. To get this far however, you had to put in the donkey work and do the tougher stuff, including the physically draining killer path to this rope: the travelator.

Were Cardiff City a contestant on the John Fashanu and Ulrika Jonsson-hosted programme, we not only would have had the indignity of going on John Anderson’s second whistle, but also the gruelling humiliation of failing to complete the travelator. Newcastle’s sharp end product provided the game’s only goal. Coloccini was first to a loose ball, his pass back out to Ryan Taylor was crisp enough to prevent pressure, and the ball back in was executed with Jack The Ripper swiftness by the blond Marc Bolan from Argentina.

Meanwhile, our passing was plain atrocious. Two second-half moments in particular ground my gears and summed up our lackadaisical efforts. During the first piece of carelessness, Chopra had the opportunity to play in Jay Bothroyd. The through-ball was over-hit and Steve Harper gathered. Then, Chopra proceeded to outdo his previous heavy pass by wasting a FK in a glorious position. His lay-off to Bothroyd was closer to the yellow and orange men’s wall and alas, the chance again went begging. It’s opportunities like these that the top sides will always take, and we proved ourselves to be the exact antonym in comparison to the visitor’s seizing upon their break.

Free-kicks seemed to be a problem for us all afternoon. Every time we won a set-piece in the first half, Whittingham spent an age in dispatching it and Newcastle were able to form their marking positions and watch the ball sail harmlessly away. Correspondingly, our shooting was profligate, daft and insular. On several occasions we squandered gained-territory via players selfishly opting for pointless pot-shots, and our only real opportunity in the six-yard box saw Gavin Rae turn the ball into a kite.

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Reading FC away for the Bluebirds this evening, a team certainly there for the proverbial taking. After two straight defeats we need to get back on track, and maybe playing away against an expansive side like Reading will prove to be just the game for us to get back into the swing of things.