The New Battle For The Midfield
Football is always evolving. For a long time, the 4-4-2 looked like the greatest system of all time.
But things changed.
Now the formation of choice for most aspirants is the 4-2-3-1 … look at almost every top club in Europe and that’s what they play.
But for every system there is a counter, and it is common now for teams to play eleven men behind the ball against us and to sacrifice one of their own front players for an extra man in midfield. Three man central midfields are becoming commonplace amongst clubs looking to contain the technicians who subscribe to the new orthodoxy.
Gerrard frequently plays three men in the central midfield, and at Hampden and at Celtic Park it strangled us.
He played deep, he put the midfield just in front of the penalty box and we ran into that brick wall time and time again, so going through them was majorly difficult, leaving us with the 4-2-3-1 system, with one option; using our wide men to put crosses into a packed penalty box for a single striker to get on the end of.
No wonder it didn’t work.
Games are won and lost in the middle of the park; if you can stop midfielders getting the ball through to the strikers you’re halfway to winning the game. A team like Sevco, who are especially effective at set pieces, can punish clubs as well as shutting them out.
Pick any three of Celtic’s central midfield options and you have a better setup than anything Sevco could have challenged us with. Our players are better on and off the ball; we’d have been able to pull their central players out of position and get the ball through them.
We’d also have neutralised their counter-attacking threat.
We’d have defended better too. If we’ve got one extra man on the edge of the penalty box, Kent never gets the shot off for his goal.