Moneyball won't win the Premiership 2012-13

Of all the available options, the guy who has a good working relationship with your out of form £50m striker is never going to be the worst.

disagree, it's like they've actually changed manager purely to get the best out of torres.

let's just see how he gets on with the 100m trio behind torres first, eh

hope they like working as hard as a chariot fleet of kuyts

Benitez has a propensity for zonal marking, which doesn't work in the Premier League

Serious eyeroll, Liverpool under Rafa were one of the best, if not the best, defensive sides in the Premiership. Their problem was lack of creativity and goals, especially when Torres was injured.

Serious eyeroll, Liverpool under Rafa were one of the best, if not the best, defensive sides in the Premiership. Their problem was lack of creativity and goals, especially when Torres was injured.

yeah the total inability to break teams down at home is a legacy of rafa's tenure for sure. towards the end of 08/09 they began hammering teams, but the defence lost something around this time too.

but the other problem is that rafa's tactical/defensive skills are just more suited to cup competitions really. a manager who believes in stifling as the primary objective has never won the premier league, as far as i can remember?

Mourinho arguably

"Stifling as the primary objective" is a slightly loaded way of putting it but there are a lot of people who'd accuse Mourinho of that.

mourinho definitely. arguably every leaguewinning side since, certainly the tevez, cron, rooney counterattack version of a few years back. Awful side to watch, outside of highlights packages.

i dunno, i think those sides are different to rafa's brand of negativity.

like there's a reason why, for example, man u could and would hammer teams at home and rafa's liverpool kept drawing.

Fergie sides have always been about scoring shitloads of goals and hammering teams, even when they've had great defences and churning uninspired midfields.

This is kind of a false framing of the debate because it implies that Rafa wasn't that arsed about scoring more goals, in fact he spent a shitload of money on strikers and a reasonable amount on wide attackers as well, he just wasn't very good at picking them and tended to discard them quickly.

well yeah, even his wingers had to act like defenders (tho there is rooney i spose)

Fergie sides have always been about scoring shitloads of goals and hammering teams

...and getting shitloads of dodgy penalty decisions/disputed goals etc

if only somebody could come up with a table to account for that

xp, that was

Fergie has always wanted to score goals, as have all managers. But for a while there it was very much based on a packed defence/midfield counterattack basis. Still had width, still scored lots of goals, still a defensive system in the main

god be with the days of the invincibles or the utd outfit where the only dm was keane, more expansive a player than he was really given credit for

it was a philosophy with rafa too though. part of the reason the wide players were discarded (even when successful like riera and benayoun, bye bye 20 goals or so when he fucked them out for no reason) was because the primary aim was for the team not to concede and for it to be a cohesive defensive unit. workrate valued above skills.

the worst-defended league in the world cd do with a good dose of "negativity" tbh

Send for Craig Levein

time was when you built a successful team from the back, now it's like the Kevin Keegan Football Circus everywhere you look

bring back man-to-man marking

Bring back George Graham

time was you didnt stop building there and people didn't wish they were watching snooker instead

English clodhoppers trying to man-to-man proper non-English footballers might be half the problem tbh

and god help me but yeah i miss George Grahamesque defending

would you really wanna see less goals tho? I say this, admittedly, as someone whose only interaction with football this season has been two half-episodes of MOTD and reading this thread

i've nothing agin defending, or good defenders, i just think that five of 'em's enough, or, gawd help me, some of that five might be able to play a bit.

I mean, kyle walker needs to defend more, i'm not a zealot here.

For all the money that epl sides have splashed out over the years, who are the biggest defensive buys? From abroad I mean, I'm not interested in £22m for Joleon Lescott. I can only think of David Luiz for eyewatering money - even Vidic would've been barely eight figures iirc.

would you really wanna see less goals tho?

yes but i recognise i am out of touch with what the public want and am probably just expressing some sort of effed-up misanthropy/luddism

David Luiz, wonder what George Graham would have made of him... a midfielder probably

I'd want to see better play - a team having to unlock a great defence and managing it once or twice is so much more interesting than two sides carving through each other at will.

am all for defenders that are comfortable on the ball, am all for playing attacking football when it's on, can't help but think the Prem is sliding into some horrible ping pong Roy of the Rovers shite and we'll be looking at basketball scores in another decade

biggest defensive buys, vertonghen for us, kompany wasn't cheap, stam was a world record, internal transfer but rio was legit, i'm likely forgetting a good few cos fuckit defenders who cares

Chelsea will have picked up most of them, £20m Ricardo Carvalho springs to mind, as does, insanely, £13m Paulo Ferreira.

Ricardo Carvalho was expensive. I'd be interested in the total figures for imported CBs vs CFs, say.

£16m for Bosingwa as well.

Ferreira was a disguised transfer fee for Jose, I've always assumed.

idk is the epl heading that way, if so then great i'll be watchn with a napkin round my neck and a knife and fork in my hand.

Really, what yr lamenting here is lack of defensive competence. And the answer to that isn't to make all yr players defenders, it's to organise your four/five defenders better or buy better four/five defenders.

Spurs are 'an attacking team', but our defensive woes aren't, currently, down to being hugely outnumbered by marauding cavalries of flanking opposition, it's usually down to gallas misding a bounce, or gallas missing a tackle, or gallas being two yards away from his man in the box, or walker just not marking a man. It's not about formation, or numbers, or even fuckin zonal, pressing, three or four or five, it's about WILL YOU DO YOUR FUCKING JOB WHEN THE BALL IS THERE YOU CUNT the rest of the time i couldn't be fucked what defenders think they should be doing, it's basically witchdoctor nonsense. Stay tight, tackle the cunt cleanly or head the ball before he does, congrats you're now a qualified centre half. Don't get any ideas, there's the canteen see you saturday.

Fairly sure you spent years in the Jol/Zokora era lamenting Spurs' lack of a midfield than can protect the back four, Darragh.

given that i agree with a reasonable amount of what darragh's saying it still raises the question "why have defenders apparently become less competent?" and i think that partly it's about team organisation, thinking in terms of an attacking unit and a defending unit independent of each other just don't cut it imo

man, Rafa could clean up here

i did say 'currently', matt- we used to be overrun by marauder types, these days it's just fuckin kone on his own with a scimitar and a nosebag

there are those teams out there where the system seems at fault- i'd offer arsenal as fair game here, based on fulham and what we were doin to em when we had eleven players. But more and more of the goals i see, it seems, are down to 'he's fucked that up, hasn't he, has gallas, the cunt'

Fuck off Mark Hughes.

As you were.

Come on, are you saying this discussion's just not relevant to QPR?

i, 'th'appens

Often reads to me like some obscure yorkshire phrase

is there not a case to be made that a lot of teams have much better attacking players?

i think so, yeah. But is there really such a thing as a large scale imbalance of attacking vs defensive talent all of a sudden? Seems unlikely...

Excitement on QPR boards about press scrum at the training ground. Though it's probable that it's just for the press conference - which may have been moved to today given the team must be going to Manchester tomorrow to prepare for their ritual humiliation, and that CHEATING DIVING WANKER Ashley Young throwing himself to the ground whenever Shaun Derry comes within 30 yards of him.

Didn't Torres's decline really start during Rafa's last season as Liverpool?

Santos, Vermaelan, Mertesacker and Koscielny all cost around 10m each iirc, to add to the debate. Bloody waste of money.

Also I'd love to see better defending and less goals, NV otm. idk we live in a world where even the Italians don't even have a great backline anymore.