O’neill has to look at what’s gone wrong and make sure that it doesn’t happen again
THERE are three key areas to get right when you’re defending – being organised at set pieces; getting in the right place when the opposition are in possession; and being prepared to handle a counter attack.
Strike one, strike two, strike three – that’s where Stoke City came unstuck at Middlesbrough last weekend. A corner, a move and a break. Ouch.
If you’re not getting those three things right you are going to lose the game.
I was tearing my hair out watching how Middlesbrough took the lead. You have to set up players to cover the line and you still have to attack the ball; it’s how you mark and how you react.
Every players has to be alert. If the first one misses it at the near post, the second gets it. This got through the whole six-yard box before it was poked in.
The ball was mid-way inside the Middlesbrough half when they started the move for the second.
A Stoke move broke down but that shouldn’t have been a worry.
When you’re in possession, you have players ahead of you working for the ball while the players behind, who are not involved in that play, take up defensive positions. Instead, Middlesbrough could just sweep through.
The third goal was a counter attack. Stoke had the ball on the edge of their box but the players weren’t ready to cut it out when Middlesbrough nicked it.
In each third of the pitch you have to be ready to take a defensive position because the opposition’s first thought will be to play behind your defence.
It all goes back, like everything does, to recruitment: you need players you can trust in and out of possession. You apply the same things in attack – can we exploit this side at set pieces, can we make the most of nicking the ball or keeping it?
And it all goes, again, to the size of the job Michael O’neill has on his hands in the transfer window and the errors of transfer windows in years gone by.
There is patience now – and rightly so – but I’m still cursing the mistakes that led Stoke to slide from 2015 to when O’neill arrived in 2019.
In the short-term, I think we have seen that Stoke are not solid enough to play the manager’s preferred 4-3-3 system against the better teams in the Championship, perhaps especially while he has key players out injured.
It was the correct call to go back to 3-5-2 against Cardiff and get reliable Danny Batth back in that defence.
It is a frustrating thing to look at that league table at the moment and see Watford, Swansea and Brentford going for the number two position, Barnsley, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Middlesbrough going for fifth and sixth – and Stoke in six teams marooned in mid-table.
They have had chances to get into that next group but not taken them. I’m concerned with the results, certainly since the turn of the year, and O’neill has to look hard at what has gone wrong and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
ONE of the rule changes since we were allowed in to watch football was to allow defenders into their own penalty area when their team is taking a goal kick.
It shouldn’t really make much difference at this level. Yes, up in the Champions League you see teams building all the way from the back and being comfortable in doing so but you’re talking about world-class players.
In the Championship you’re playing against teams who mainly work on putting pressure on the opposition. That’s how they get their chances. Stoke haven’t really been caught out by doing this but it’s asking for trouble with little reward.
I look it and consider the chances of going all the way from that position to the other end and scoring. The percentages are minimal. Lou Macari used to always tell me he didn’t want to see centrebacks having the ball in their own half. He wanted the ball in the attacking half.
In the 1980s, Charlie Hughes worked out for the FA that if it takes five passes or fewer you’ve got more chances of scoring a goal – and football hasn’t changed that much since then.
People might turn their noses up at the idea of direct football but this is playing forward, possession football. You’ve got Steven Fletcher (left) who can hold up the ball, Nick Powell to go through and wide players to work out towards.
You want to get the ball to your best attacking as much and as quickly as possible in good areas.
Making it difficult for yourself makes me scratch my head.