 SATURDAY NOVEMBER 21 2009 |
| Opinion | |
| It takes some time in the middle | |
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NOV 9 — On the one hand, there is Sir Alex F***-the-Ref, on the other is Carlo Ancelotti. One says he lost to Liverpool and Chelsea and drew with Sunderland because of the man in black. The other actually did the job of beating both Liverpool and Manchester United with clean sheets. It is difficult to find a more astute mind in the game than Ancelotti. He won league, cup and European titles in eight years in charge of Milan — to take the Fergie comparison further, even one of the greatest managers English football has seen took seven years to win his first league title — before moving to Chelsea where his side, after edging Man United 1-0 last night, look dominant in the current Premiership race. |
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Maybe he just knows how to manage ageing teams — his Milan side was captained by 41-year-old Paolo Maldini, who finally hung up his boots when Ancelotti left Milan and Chelsea's starting 11 has an average age of about 29. Maybe he knows how to pick a club at the right time. Whatever. This man has the look of someone who will be lifting the Premiership trophy at the end of the season. Ahead of yesterday's top-of-the-table clash with Manchester United, he gave a keen analysis of how an otherwise out-of-sorts Liverpool team managed to gun down the Red Devils. "Liverpool played a fantastic match, a strong match, and put a lot of pressure on the pitch,'' said Ancelotti. "That's why they won. They didn't give United any possibility to play like they want to play. It was a good lesson for us because Manchester can suffer when there's pressure on their midfielders. I don't want to play against other team's weaknesses. We want to put our own qualities on the pitch." Perhaps he is also either a wily handler of the media, or just not very good at communicating. Was he saying he would copy Liverpool or that he won't? In the end, it turned out to be a bit of gamesmanship and Ancelotti won the mind games this time. He did well not to tell his side to chase United down every corner and alley and it was Fergie who took the bait and tried to "out-Liverpool" Liverpool against the Blues. While Liverpool were definitely on top of Man United at Anfield, it is noteworthy that they only had 43 per cent of the possession and only broke the deadlock after Yossi Benayoun's extraordinary through ball had caught Rio Ferdinand napping for a Fernando Torres goal. Liverpool didn't just go out and pressure United all around the pitch. Rather, they let United have the ball in their own half and disallowed Michael Carrick and Paul Scholes from having more than two seconds with the ball facing the Liverpool goal. United were then reduced to ineffective long balls to either Wayne Rooney, who is not the best in the air, or Dimitar Berbatov, for whom a physical battle is not his favourite cuppa. On the other hand, Lucas Leiva had an unusually excellent game for Liverpool, shutting down the United midfield and even playing a key part in both Liverpool goals. On the subject of Lucas — yes, I know most of you are waiting to heckle me on this, so here you go, I hate to disappoint after all — it is a shame that he hasn't been able to carry that form into following games. But it is more likely that he has not been able to. Weaker teams tend to sit back against Liverpool and this is where Lucas and Mascherano both have a problem. Neither is able to break down teams who park the team bus in front of their penalty area. It would be simplistic to say that Lucas had a bad game against Lyon simply because he did not convert the best chance of the game. He was mostly neat and tidy in possession but failed really to create anything going forward against a Lyon side who were clearly happy to draw the game. United, on the other hand, were far more adventurous and Lucas contributed to counterattack goals which saw six passes or less before the ball hit the back of the net. Back to Stamford Bridge — we saw United trying to harry not just Chelsea's midfield, but their defence as well, not something that John Terry and Ricardo Carvalho, paragons of composure, found difficult to handle. Ancelloti showed enough imagination to realise that his midfield and Liverpool's are completely different. Quite simply, Leiva and Mascherano have the work ethic to work their socks off guarding their defensive third of the field. Could Chelsea have done the same? The only workhorse they had was Michael Essien. On top of that, Fergie, for all his ridiculous rants, knew enough to have learnt his lesson that a Carrick-Scholes pairing do not have the muscle nor the heart to dominate in midfield against battlers from the top sides. United's results this year has shown that they do better when someone like Anderson or at least Darren Fletcher — their surprise performer from last season — have started the game. In United's two subsequent games since the Liverpool defeat, Ferguson used Carrick-Anderson or Scholes-Fletcher and against Chelsea, continued using a passer-tackler formula in Carrick-Fletcher. But curiously, Fergie also decided to drop Berbatov — who he had declared fit earlier — and played Anderson in the backup striker's role. The ploy was quite transparent as Anderson set about his role as Essien's Siamese twin. It worked in that Man United managed to win the ball high up the pitch several times but then lacked any real penetration as Ryan Giggs and Antonia Valencia failed to trouble Chelsea down the wings. Indeed, it was Chelsea who had the better chances through the game, with six shots on target against two. Chelsea simply, as they should, played to their own strengths, which is pretty much getting Didier Drogba to batter defences into submission and Frank Lampard, Joe Cole and Nicolas Anelka to pick up the pieces. In this case, of course, the winning goal was dubious due to the validity of the free kick and suspicions of Drogba being offside, but Chelsea outplayed United simply by getting their opponents to change their game plan. It is strange to see Ferguson, whose earlier MU teams saw the likes of Bryan Robson, Neil Webb, Paul Ince and the legendary Roy Keane dominating the middle of the park, now having a problem with his midfield. Maybe it is time to accept that he needs to buy a new midfield general and that Scholes and Giggs are getting a bit long in the tooth. Perhaps the only person that can still squeeze out top-class performances out of these geriatrics is the man who beat him yesterday. |
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