Areas Nigel Pearson will want to work on from Tuesday? To Build from a position of Strength.

[Mr Popodopolous]

Was giving this a bit of thought, and though it was a great win and a great win- it was a particularly great first half.

After half time we did a lot of good things without the ball and many positives to take but I wonder what areas he would have wanted to be done better in that 2nd half. I expect he'll be striving for consistency and constant improvement.

Here are 3 I think he'll be looking at:

1. Better possession in the second half- keeping more of the ball can enable a bit of resting in possession.
2. Better counterattacking in the 2nd half. The 6 shots on target and 6 shots was brilliant in the first half- but unsure we had one in the second?
3. The timing of the substitutions. Could that have come earlier- ie Massengo to help with Point 1, Semenyo maybe earlier to freshen it up, run at Middlesbrough with point 2.

With some of the above, while Middlesbrough were always going to come strong, parts of the above might have pushed Middlesbrough back that bit further and eased a bit of 2nd half pressure, got us higher up the pitch.

Don't get me wrong, Tuesday was brilliant- and massively refreshing and a very pleasant surprise after recent weeks, but this just has to be a first step. Constructive criticism, taking the positives and building on them- in short, Building from a position of strength.

[RedRaw]

Even though we were 0-3 up at half time, there was this niggling concern that once Colin had given his team the big one, they would come at us hard second half. Usually you would see a goal conceded in the first 10 mins and then the pressure was on. They get a second and then suddenly it’s backs to the wall.

I felt we handled that first 10/15 minutes of the second half well and then to some extent, as the sky commentator mentioned, we were ‘managing’ the game. 

I would like to have seen us being a bit more positive in an attacking sense (I don’t recall any real attempts second half) and a bit more tidy with play (a lot of weak, misplaced passes) but that said, we were never really under the cosh to the extent I thought they would get back in it, even when they scored the goal.

hopefully that was due to our game management rather than Middlesbrough being poor

[beaverface]

Pearson mentioned in his video yesterday that he thought we could be a little more compact, so id expect some work on that in the first instance.

 

[Robbored]

The surprise result at the Riverside was mostly motivated simply by Big Nige sitting in the stand. Every City player wanted to impress the new manager and their motivation was there for all to see. To a man they all upped their game. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a similar performance at the Liberty on Saturday 

The novelty of Nige arriving will eventually wear off and that’s when we’ll see how good he is.

As for what he’ll want to work on - not much at first I’d imagine.Maybe the odd tweak here or there but he’s going to need more than one or two competitive games to assess the resources available to him.

 

[SecretSam]

3 areas to look at:

1. The defence
2. The midfield
3. The attack

(Oh, and the medical team)

[Monkeh]

He will work on organising the defence first,

He will of noted the amount we backed off in the second half and the crosses we let into the box,

Second He will work on the midfield, he would of been relatively happy with what he seen but we need to be better in possession,

Once those to are sorted we will be fine,

[Blackbird1]

22 minutes ago, Monkeh said:

He will work on organising the defence first,

He will of noted the amount we backed off in the second half and the crosses we let into the box,

Second He will work on the midfield, he would of been relatively happy with what he seen but we need to be better in possession,

Once those to are sorted we will be fine,

Thanks coach...tapped into NP mindset, amazing. 

[Blackbird1]

30 minutes ago, Robbored said:

The surprise result at the Riverside was mostly motivated simply by Big Nige sitting in the stand. Every City player wanted to impress the new manager and their motivation was there for all to see. To a man they all upped their game. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a similar performance at the Liberty on Saturday 

The novelty of Nige arriving will eventually wear off and that’s when we’ll see how good he is.

As for what he’ll want to work on - not much at first I’d imagine.Maybe the odd tweak here or there but he’s going to need more than one or two competitive games to assess the resources available to him.

 

He has a hugely depleted squad to work with, I would think he will just get the remaining few to be the best they can be. Whilst making sure TM is kept away from first team duties.

 

[Monkeh]

7 minutes ago, Blackbird1 said:

Thanks coach...tapped into NP mindset, amazing. 

So you disagree? Try being constructive instead of a ****

[Floatn Over]

Hopefully there will be an improvement in performances to the end of the season due to NP’s influence, player confidence rising and injuries recover.  If then the club can strike a deal to retain him, something I feel more confident of after the interview, I think we might see some unexpected signings, similar to when Cotts recruited Wilbs, not necessarily expensive just NP saying “yes I know he’s 28 and is at X club but that is who I see running our midfield etc” fans and the club will need to show trust in such decisions.

Also some of our existing players converted into slightly different contributors, three I think might benefit from NP’s influences are HNM, COD and TM, the latter particularly.

I liked very much the interview comments on player development.

[1960maaan]

I think Tuesday was a very good game for Pearson to watch first up. Showed what we can do, and do well when most parts are working. It showed what we struggle at and I think how current mindset is.

3-0 in a way made things difficult. We needed a win, we had the game for the taking but if we conceded early things would get nervy. We did sit back again, but I don't think that was a surprise, shame we didn't break better and we were our old selves where the ball is cleared but came straight back. 

I would think one of the first things to work on is care o the ball, specially when we win it back. Tuesday showed we have some decent players and a reasonable team, NP needs to galvanise that and make us better in possession and get us to defend higher . Last ditch defending is great, but I'd rather see us cut off the source and not have to block so many shots. Big job as there is little time to work with them between games. 
I do think Pearsons message will be clearer and more straight forward than the last 2 coaches.

[RedRock]

Consistency, consistency, consistency.

Maintain the high standards achieved in the ‘Boro match. 
 

Probably, the worst aspect of the Club in the last five seasons. Players that play well one week, ‘disappear’ for the next four. 

[Davefevs]

1 hour ago, Monkeh said:

He will work on organising the defence first,

He will of noted the amount we backed off in the second half and the crosses we let into the box,

Second He will work on the midfield, he would of been relatively happy with what he seen but we need to be better in possession,

Once those to are sorted we will be fine,

Yesterday he actually said a few things of relevance when asked about our defence being 3rd worst in the Champ (goals conceded) before last nights games:

• It’s a collective
• defence starts from the front
• attack starts from the back

and then whether he’ll start on the defence his response was:

• we haven’t scored many goals either

so I’d suggest he will be looking at all aspects.

[cidered abroad]

Understandable that in the second half Boro would come at us. With our recent run of very bad performances and results it was also expected that we would be nervous in defence. In general, however, I thought we set the defensive line some ten metres higher up the pitch than the edge of our penalty area or even deeper that we have been.

The midfield and strikers did a better job than previous games. Mariappa was good at keeping the back line from going too deep.

Big improvement over recent games.

[Robbored]

1 hour ago, Monkeh said:

He will work on organising the defence first,

He will of noted the amount we backed off in the second half and the crosses we let into the box,

Second He will work on the midfield, he would of been relatively happy with what he seen but we need to be better in possession,

Once those to are sorted we will be fine,

Yep, as a defender himself I’d imagine that’ll be his priority. Limiting crosses into our box would probably be top of the list and that is the responsibility of the entire team. 

Many of us have seen numerous managers come and go over the years but for some unexplainable  reason I feel really optimistic about about Big Nige.

 

[Ska Junkie]

1 hour ago, beaverface said:

Pearson mentioned in his video yesterday that he thought we could be a little more compact, so id expect some work on that in the first instance.

 

I agree and thought his most telling comment was 'defence starts from the front and attack starts from the back', all move as one unit. Very simple but not what we have been doing. I hope we also see the end of, as mentioned earlier, the 'we're 1 up, lock it down' as we clearly can't do it at the moment. I appreciate there's a difference between sitting back and being forced back but during our run of defeats it's been both ineffective and awful to view and must have been a tactical thing rather than a 'forced' thing as it was happening all the time. 

[TonyTonyTony]

Article about what he did at Watford when he came in may offer some insights :

https://thefalse9.com/2020/06/nigel-pearson-tactics-watford-formation.html

[LondonBristolian]

1 hour ago, Blackbird1 said:

He has a hugely depleted squad to work with, I would think he will just get the remaining few to be the best they can be. Whilst making sure TM is kept away from first team duties.

 

I‘m really hoping he can help Taylor Moore. Pearson was a centre back himself and, whilst my memory is a little hazy of him as a player, I think there are some similarities.

Moore has pretty much everything you want from a centre back except the ability to regularly concentrate for 90 minutes. Unfortunately that is a massive “except“ and Moore will never have a career at Championship level unless he can fix it. But I cannot think of a better person than Pearson for him to learn from and, if he ever gets that one thing right, he’d be a hell of a player.

[Blackbird1]

2 hours ago, Monkeh said:

So you disagree? Try being constructive instead of a ****

No, but even you I and anyone else except him will know the order of things. How you can list what he intends to do is some insight. 

[Blackbird1]

1 hour ago, Davefevs said:

Yesterday he actually said a few things of relevance when asked about our defence being 3rd worst in the Champ (goals conceded) before last nights games:

• It’s a collective
• defence starts from the front
• attack starts from the back

and then whether he’ll start on the defence his response was:

• we haven’t scored many goals either

so I’d suggest he will be looking at all aspects.

Probably, but he better run that past OTIB qualified coaches first, just leave it to the man to sort it out.

[mozo]

I think his main influence will be psychological. Reinforcing the unity of the group and making each individual feel 20% more assured and focused. 

[steviestevieneville]

1 hour ago, LondonBristolian said:

I‘m really hoping he can help Taylor Moore. Pearson was a centre back himself and, whilst my memory is a little hazy of him as a player, I think there are some similarities.

Moore has pretty much everything you want from a centre back except the ability to regularly concentrate for 90 minutes. Unfortunately that is a massive “except“ and Moore will never have a career at Championship level unless he can fix it. But I cannot think of a better person than Pearson for him to learn from and, if he ever gets that one thing right, he’d be a hell of a player.

He needs to improve his decision making massively as well as his concentration plus being calmer . He looks panicked all the time , probably down to the amount of mistakes he makes. Apart from that he’s a excellent player. 
joking aside , I hope he proves me wrong but I just can’t see it . 

[Robbored]

16 minutes ago, mozo said:

I think his main influence will be psychological. Reinforcing the unity of the group and making each individual feel 20% more assured and focused. 

Yep, just his presence will have had that effect as we saw at Boro and it’ll be even greater when he’s had the time to work with and assess the squad.

Not only that but he’s brining plenty of experience and know how which he’ll begin to implement sooner rather than later I hope.

 

[mozo]

23 minutes ago, Robbored said:

Yep, just his presence will have had that effect as we saw at Boro and it’ll be even greater when he’s had the time to work with and assess the squad.

Not only that but he’s brining plenty of experience and know how which he’ll begin to implement sooner rather than later I hope.

 

Yeah he has a presence which really helps. Besides that I think he’s clued up on team psychology. He said he was already assessing body language of players on day one. 

[LondonBristolian]

35 minutes ago, steviestevieneville said:

He needs to improve his decision making massively as well as his concentration plus being calmer . He looks panicked all the time , probably down to the amount of mistakes he makes. Apart from that he’s a excellent player. 
joking aside , I hope he proves me wrong but I just can’t see it . 

I see it as all part of the same thing. He switches off, suddenly finds himself in trouble, panics, makes a bad decision and it leads to a mistake.

Psychological aspects of the game can be the hardest thing to address and improve upon so there is certainly a risk that he never quite get there. I think there may be strategies and techniques he could try but whether or not those think work will make or break his career. 

[42nite]

Hopefully he will work on making us more professional at closing games down.

3-0 up no need to be running all over the place, just be compact and slow the game down.

We've seen many teams do it to us, and it hurts like mad, but when it's your team doing it it's quite amusing, and it gets results which Nige is very good at!

 

[Mr Popodopolous]

3 hours ago, 42nite said:

Hopefully he will work on making us more professional at closing games down.

3-0 up no need to be running all over the place, just be compact and slow the game down.

We've seen many teams do it to us, and it hurts like mad, but when it's your team doing it it's quite amusing, and it gets results which Nige is very good at!

 

Better possession, by which I mean defending with the ball can help with this too. 

Definitely need to become more compact though but Tuesday...feels a good base to work from, a strong starting point.

[TonyTonyTony]

2 hours ago, JonDolman said:

4231 could be the way to go.

That seems to be his favoured formation. As we are now, having 2 DM's to protect the CB's sounds sensible to me. The 3 can also drop back - that will also help our MF as for far too long we have just looked outnumbered in MF. Sounds like plan to me. Which players he employs in that system will be interesting !

 

[LondonBristolian]

2 hours ago, JonDolman said:

It's interesting to see if Pearson will change shape. We looked good in the 352. But that doesn't mean that is the right system for Pearson. 

4231 could be the way to go.

I think a lot depends on how Pearson sees it with the players. He played 4-2-3-1 at Watford but - as the link @TonyTonyTony posted earlier in the thread shows - a lot of that was a tactic around getting the most of the talents of Sarr on the right of an attacking three.

Whilst I think Semenyo has a lot of potential, I'm far from convinced he'd have the same impact Sarr had within the same system. It may well be that one thing Pearson observed on Tuesday - and this is not a sentence I expected to write prior to the game - is how well Famara and Wells linked up in the game, along with how effective Bakinson's forward balls were and how well Nagy linked play. I wonder if the tactics he uses are about maximising those strengths for the next few months and then evolving the team if he is kept on next year and can bring in his own players. 

[steviestevieneville]

2 hours ago, JonDolman said:

It's interesting to see if Pearson will change shape. We looked good in the 352. But that doesn't mean that is the right system for Pearson. 

4231 could be the way to go.

Longer term I’d say yes. Might be too soon for that atm, especially without a recognised left back . Wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same team & set up. With just two training , he may of focused on just making us more compact 

6 hours ago, TonyTonyTony said:

Article about what he did at Watford when he came in may offer some insights :

https://thefalse9.com/2020/06/nigel-pearson-tactics-watford-formation.html

Decent read this