Football stuff

You can also argue that more subs favours the richer clubs, so I think it's a slightly different issue.

In any case, to substantiate your argument you'd need to look at total squad size, distribution of playing time and starts, that sort of thing.

I wouldn't be surprised if Man City were mid pack at best, with teams like Chelsea and Manchester United rotating far more (in the desperate hope of finding something that works!)

My issue is with the pressing not the passing.

If a team dominates possession, the players are less fatigued and can press more when out of possession.

Sure. I don't have beef with man city doing what they need to win.

The beef I have is that everyone else seems to be copying it - which, to my mind anyway, feels very self defeating as you just make it a question of which players can do it better, and usually the team with the deepest pockets will do that.

There doesn't seem to be an obvious counter to the way city play, which makes it chuffing boring.

Tends to only work for a limited time as well. Manchester United used to pull off the occasional good result under Ole as manager, against teams that let them. However anyone, including the better teams, who were wise to it could easily deny them space, and still have a good chance of breaking them down when in possession. I.e there is less of a compromise for the pressing team.

Leicester City's championship was built on an extraordinary number of one goal wins. Against teams that consistently under estimated them.

I may be wrong but I think they out performed their XG at both ends that season to a quite amazing degree. Hence, they never got remotely close again.

Agree. It is like watching speed chess. Remarkable but not as exciting as tiddly winks.

That's why I think a subtle rule change might help.

The balance of offside now clearly benefits the defence. An attacker is by definition more likely to be leaning goalwards than a defender in essentially the same place. VAR looks systematically for reasons to rule out goals.

A rule change favouring the momentum and posture of the attacking player would make it more dangerous to defend high. In turn that would promote longer passes from midfield and/or create more space in midfield.

I understand the rationale behind judging offside based on the parts of the body that can touch a ball, but the result of measuring things the way they now do (rather than by eye) is a tendency towards short passing in a congested third of the pitch, the cut back goal from close range, and away from the thunderbastard.

I gave an answer to this above. Only possible to play on the break if you are allowed to. City can snuff this out quite well by just not sitting quite as high up the pitch, and without unduly compromising their attacking approach.

We just watch different games of football it appears.

Brentford showed a good blueprint, mix up various patterns of play based around being aggressive and pressing high. You have to try and take Ederson out of the game which is easier said than done. As MOTD showed at the weekend, when Brentford did press and cut off the short pass, he started hitting 40 yard balls straight down the middle to Haaland.

Out of possession, City will commit 3 or 4 players to win the ball back. Rather than passing your way out of trouble in short triangles a la City, I would switch the play, hit longer cross field balls to try and open some space and take their players out of the game.

Overall, it is also a mindset thing. Teams go in defensive and try and hold out which nearly always means losing. If you view City as a loss from the outset as many teams will, you may as well use that to free yourselves up psychologically and go at them. If you have already written the game off from the start you may as well go down swinging, you never know what will happen in that scenario.

I still remember the inter Mourinho game against Barca - or earlier the utd versus Barca or even Real vs Barca games.

Barca were the pep death-by-passing team but there were ways around it. You could play that way or you could be physical, direct, and fast on the counter without being a long-ball agricultural team.

There are lots of ways to skin the cat, but that tactical diversity seems to have disappeared. It's like it used to be rock paper scissors and now it's just how big is your rock.

I do think there's a slight unfortunate aspect here, which is that once the team with the most money takes up the moneyball approach, its no longer a fun underdog story.

They'll quite a few of those if they end up in the Norther Premier League.

The three point revolution was basketball'ss version of moneyball.

Stats and probability based sports, either way. Leads to uniteresting sport.

We need more thunderbastard goals and, as RC says, more Wimbledon.

Beat them in the semis to win the whole thing. Scholes scored the winner, remember like it was yesterday (year before Guardiola, granted but it was the same vibe)

more games means more money