Actually, Newcastle United ‘absolutely buzzing’ after Alexander Isak exit

It looks like we got it wrong on Newcastle again; they have the ‘depression derby’ on Saturday and Barcelona on Thursday and they are ‘absolutely buzzing’.

What kind of mood are you in as the Premier League returns?

Let us know at theeditor@football365.com

Some Newcastle United optimism

Just looked at the mood rankings article and had a little chuckle about the depression derby that’ll take place on Saturday afternoon. I think having Newcastle at the bottom of the mood rankings might be a place or two low. The mood is grim for sure but it’s a bit better now than it was the day before the window closed.

The Isak saga is over, it couldn’t have ended positively for Newcastle, but the endless commentary on it was very demoralising. A new strike force is in, but Woltemade is such an unknown quantity for a considerably inflated price, it’ll be weeks before we know if that was successful or not. Of course 20 minutes without a goal on Saturday will inevitably have the commentator team bringing Isak back up again.

The upside is that you couldn’t ask for a much better opponent to boost the mood than Wolves. If we can get a couple of goals and a win, to drag us a few places up the league table the mood will jump considerably. A draw or a loss though and I’d agree with the rock bottom mood placing. Fingers crossed
Derek from Dundalk

…20th in the mood rankings? We’ve got Barcelona at St James’ on Thursday! Absolutely buzzing.

Bruno and Tonali in the middle, big Dan at the back, Wissa looks class, … and we got £130m out of Liverpool for some guy who can’t get a game up front for Sweden over Antony Elanga..!

HWTL, Roger, (Wolte is going to be fun too), Newcastle in London

Show me the money

It’s genuinely funny that Casemiro, Kai Havertz, Raheem Sterling and Jadon Sancho are the top-paid players at their clubs. The jury is technically out on Sancho, but still. Just hilariously bad management from these clubs.
Mike, LFC, Dubai

Wirtz will be a flop until he’s not

Henry scored 26 goals in 48 games in his first season for Arsenal. Including 17 in 31 in the league. I put it to Lee that any Arsenal fans saying Wenger had wasted money on Henry were idiots. Henry was famously not great for Juve in half a season at serie but Lee can only hope for a similarly slow start to Wirtz’ Liverpool career.

Ronaldo was quite annoying for a couple of years. But he was also a) 18 and b) not signed for £100M+. In the year Ronaldo was Wirtz’ age he scored 42 in 49 and won Premier League and Champions League double. Again, Lee can only hope that Wirtz has a similar impact this season.

Wirtz cost an absolute fortune so he’s going to be scrutinised at every turn, sorry about that. You can’t compared him to two of the best players to have played the game until he has reached those heady heights himself. He’s just as likely to be a Pogba, a Schevchenko or even a Robinho. Until such point as otherwise proven he will be an expensive flop in the eyes of all other fans. This is the way.

I know this feels like uncomfortable territory for Liverpool fans as they’re not used to splashing the cash but take comfort in the fact that some of your other forays into this territory have yielded your Alissons and your Van Dijks. If you’re going to trust anyone to spend that much money at the moment then it’s going to be Liverpool.
Ashmundo

The Dark Knight Returns…in red

This Sunday’s derby has all the markings of The Dark Knight Returns in football form. Picture Manchester United as the fallen giant—our caped crusader gone grey and written off, limping back into the spotlight. The critics say he’s finished, the city’s moved on, and the villains (Manchester City) are ruling the streets with their glitzy gadgets and smug smirks.

But as Frank Miller taught us, a beaten-down legend doesn’t stay quiet forever. He rises, cracks a few jaws, and reminds everyone that once you’ve been the Dark Knight, you don’t forget how to land a punch. City might look like the recovering powerhouse, patched up after a few knocks, but every recovering villain underestimates the old hero at their peril.

So when United stride out at the Etihad, don’t be shocked if the panels flip: the fallen giant becomes the headline act, and the so-called rulers of Manchester discover they’ve just been written into someone else’s comeback issue.
Gaptoothfreak, Man. Utd., New York (Streets won’t forget RvP scoring that winner)

READ: Amorim and United should smell City blood before Manchester derby

Why F365 should write about tactics like me!

So, my last email was a critique of a F365 article that I thought was poor. I wanted to quickly add, as I did at the start of that mail, that I enjoy the site, think the opinions offered in most pieces are interesting and intelligent, and don’t plan on leaving despite whatever shortcomings I think there are.

I also consider it important, and credit to you, that you continue to share opinions on your mail page that show frustration and dissent with the content you deliver. But in the spirit of constructive feedback to go along with constructive criticism, I thought I would offer up a request for something that would greatly (to me at least) improve the overall quality and enjoyment of visiting the site. Tactics.

F365 seems unusually reticent to dig down into the evolving and extremely important aspect of tactics in football. There are few articles devoted exclusively to the evolving tactics of the leading teams, and little interest in utilising the enormous lull in activity by discussing something other than transfer guff. Perhaps this is part of your business model, and you feel other sites offer this information already? Perhaps your team of journalists don’t consider yourselves well-suited to the finer details of tactical developments.

Perhaps F365 being exclusively in a written medium doesn’t fit well with illustrating tactical setups on screen? I assume there are certainly some reasons for this otherwise glaring omission from your content.

However, for me, there is space on your site and ways around most issues, considering the increased value in including this aspect of football. Also, its importance to the success of football teams can’t be overstated. It’s like Formula 1 and the advanced engineering and aerodynamics that underpin the sport. Many people like just watching the races, but as many like the constant battle behind the scenes to stay atop the arms race of engineering the fastest possible car.

And like Formula 1, the Premier League is at the absolute pinnacle of tactical developments due to the quality of coaches that work in the league.

To that end, let me explain my current area of interest as an example of what I would like to read on your site. Man City’s tactical evolution.

When Pep arrived at City in 2016 he was already the tactical maestro of club football. His Barcelona side had adopted the famous ‘tika-taka’ style of possession football and dominated the European scene. After Barca, Pep evolved into a more physical, quicker, but equally possession dominating style when taking over a talented Bayern team, replicating the domestic dominance of his Barcelona side. He then came to England and attempted to take on our ‘Stoke on a wet Tuesday night’ physically demanding, relentlessly paced Premier League.

After acclimatising in his first season, his City team went on to dominate domestically. 18 major trophies in less than 10 years, including 6 league titles, is unbridled success in anyone’s book, but that all stopped last season when the wheels came off in spectacular fashion.

The Man City of 2024-25 was mid-table fodder rescued from mediocrity by its expensively assembled individual talent. The world gasped at this sudden fall from grace, but the reasons are still ill-defined. Most people assume the side lost ‘legs’ and had suffered burn-out after years spent at the very top.

This could well be the case, with new faces and fresh energy bought, only a slight tactical switch might result in the old Man City showing up and a resumption of the dominance of the last decade. However, the profile of players acquired combined with the appointment of Pep Lijnders, hints at the club deciding more than fresh legs are required.

Guardiola’s tactical strength was in understanding that modern football is a zonal game. In a very basic sense, before the 1980’s most managers adopted an approach of trying to recruit the best players they could afford, to then field them in a bog-standard setup against an opposing team playing another bog-standard setup. This would result in players matching up against an opposite number with the better players more frequently winning the duels and thus the game.

Obviously, there were variances, commitments to physical conditioning, variations in tactical approaches and numerous other aspects, but essentially the key for those managers was acquiring the best players. Then along came Arrigo Sacchi and his ilk and a sea change happened. These coaches understood that through zonal influence you could tactically setup your team to play football in specific areas, perhaps with an advantage in player numbers or risk to either goal, and utilise this dominance of areas of the pitch to gain an advantage that would make an inferior side able to beat a better opponent.

Over the years this developed and coaches tried to understand the areas of the pitch they wanted to affect, how to create conditions and patterns to defend and attack these areas, and how best to stop their opponents’ tactics from affecting key areas of the pitch. Pep came along at the full maturity of this concept with a brilliant plan to utilise it to its fullest.

His sides managed to have such control of the pitch, through complex patterns of play and possession dominance, that he could kill the game as a contest. There are thousands of small tactical aspects to his overall brilliance, from acquiring specific player profiles, rigid positional roles, building up from the back, goalkeepers being ball players, split CB’s, constant movement of the ball around players and myriad other ideas. The result was his teams usually created a lot and conceded very little. That will win you football games. Yet last season it stopped.

For some within the game, City’s struggles were because they fell foul of two of the newest tactical advancements in ultra-modern football. The first of these is the evolution from exclusively zonal importance to a combination of both zonal and tempo/transitional football. One of Pep’s greatest strengths was teaching his players how understanding their position allowed his tactics to extract maximum effect.

Thierry Henry spoke about this on the Overlap when explaining why Pep insisted he played rigidly from the left and continued to make unused runs in behind to force space in other areas for his team to exploit. Pep requires a positional framework so as to best utilise the zonal spaces. His total control of the team’s style allowed the players the most space to hurt an opponent, at least until recently.

This approach first started to encounter problems with the pressing of Jurgen Klopp. Klopp understood where Pep liked his players to be in certain moments of a game so could create specific pressing patterns to exploit this. Pep would counter this with his own positional evolutions and largely retained most of his tactical advantage, but it created the first drawback of his rigid positional approach. This is the crux of Pep’s current problem, as pressing/counter pressing has evolved, this positional rigidity is becoming a greater and greater burden.

Teams can better prepare moments and ways of pressing his teams because they understand not just the position of his players, but the position of players through all phases of play as City work the ball up the pitch. Additionally, as pressing has become more widely adopted, and the triggers and patterns of these presses evolve, positional fluidity is increasingly important in allowing players better opportunity to press opponents. Yet with Pep’s system, the more his players move from their predetermined position, the more difficult it is to enact his highly effective patterns of play. And this issue takes me on to his second tactical problem, modern pressing theory.

Pep and his sides have always pressed the opponent. His Barca sides would harry and jockey immediately when they lost possession attempting to win the ball straight back. However, the reason for this is not the reason why modern team’s press. Pep understood that a team can’t win if it doesn’t have the ball – his possession dominant approach based on this simple axiom. So, he wanted his team to close their opposite number as soon as they received the ball so he could win it back and resume possession. Also, he knew if the opposition attempted to aggressively press his own team, his passing patterns and elite squad would be better able to play around them.

Pep’s press was the type that existed in football from the very start. It’s a simple, man closest/opposite number receives it, you immediately close them down. It’s straight forward and very effective. You don’t lose shape, and you force the player into an action hoping to turn the ball over. Pep did this so he could get possession back, recycle the ball into his tactical setup and carefully work it down the field. In contrast, modern pressing theory is not to just win the ball back, it is to create chances from the advantageous position you have won the ball in.

Pep has progressed with this aspect, adopting more advanced pressing approaches, but it was always far less important due to his reliance on passing patterns and positional play. Unfortunately, as his team’s performance declined last season a realisation dawned. “It doesn’t work like it worked in the past.”

If this was Pep admitting defeat with his old approach, his statement that ‘modern football is not positional, you have to ride the rhythm’ accepts that mastering and harnessing transitional tempo will be important in the future of football tactics. That has reflected in City’s personnel changes this season. Firstly, Pep Lijnders has come on board as Guardiola’s assistant. As the coach of Klopp’s famous gegenpressing approach it is clear Guardiola feels his team need to have a more concerted pressing approach. The players he has brought in also indicate a change from technical passing midfielders to ball carriers who can dribble past opponents. This is an important facet for modern day midfielders because it understands that when the opposition press, being able to dribble past and not just rely on passing around, allows you an additional opportunity to break the press.

And the downside to any press is that if you can beat it, there is additional space to attack. Also, those who are best at suckering in a press only to beat it with the dribble are afforded more cautious closing down thereafter, allowing them more space to look for a pass. The perfect example of this is Ryan Gravenberch.

When he was first deployed as a no. 6 for Liverpool, he would get closed down quickly and aggressively, however over the first half of last season it became clear this was counting against the pressing team due to his propensity to break the press with a dribble or turn and then carry the ball at pace up the pitch to launch an attack. The result was the second half of the season saw more delicate closing down to avoid gifting him the chance to beat the player on the dribble. This then allowed him more space to dictate play with his passing.

Lijnders has already started adjusting City’s press into something resembling the modern and aggressive styling, but it will not be easy. City against Brighton adopted a slightly novel approach and came unstuck. Usually a pressing team will not dedicate one player to closing down the GK, because you sacrifice that player behind the play if the GK passes short to a defender, This then draws another deeper player up the pitch to cover. Instead, a player will drift between GK and defender, jumping between them based on who has possession.

For 60 minutes City’s aggressive GK press worked very well. City dominated and conceded very little. Unfortunately for them, Brighton changed tactics and personnel and this led to a drastic change for the last 3rd of the game. Brighton realised City’s aggressive press sacrificed an attacker with the GK and that the rest of the players covering automatically left a FB free. As Brighton passed to the free FB City would quickly jump who they were marking to move across the pitch. Due to the distance left to cover from City’s players they couldn’t get there quick enough to block the FB immediately switching the play.

As City’s players en masse shuffled over to defend the FB, and he then switched the play, the other side of the pitch was extremely exposed. Brighton exploited this vulnerability ruthlessly. In the last 30 minutes of the game Brighton created more than twice the xG City had created in the first two thirds of the game. It was a gaping flaw in the press exposed in brutal fashion.

This aspect of City’s game plan will be extremely interesting to watch over the coming months to see if Pep can master pressing the way he mastered positional play. If he can’t, it might be his teams will never dominate like they used to…
Ed Ern

The usual Mailbox nonsense about fans

I hope the irony of indignant responses for calling a particular fan base “self righteous” is not lost…
Lewis, Busby Way

…Mark, can I just say, I’m outraged by your comments.

Us Arsenal fans in these here parts are the most level headed, reasonable sorts, perfectly normally marking our calendars with dodgy referee decisions, clutching our Will Ford voodoo dolls and replica knee braces of all our favourite crocked Arsenal stars.

Spend some time with us, get to know us and then you’ll retract your hasty and unprovoked sentiments.

Wibble.
Tom, Leyton

You don’t care about Muslim footballers? Really?

The next time G Thomas, Breda proclaims that he cannot think of ‘anything less interesting or relevant than the England players [sic] religion’, I would humbly suggest that he rereads one of his own emails. That should be more than enough to suffice in providing him with a deeper barrel of tedium and irrelevance from which to scrape.

As I have written on these pages before, if you don’t care about something, taking the time to write in to a website and publicise it to the masses, is really not the action of someone who doesn’t care. What you actually want to say is that you don’t like it. You don’t like it that other people feel it is important that an underrepresented minority group within football have a role model to suggest that, yes, they might be able to make it too. You don’t like it. And you are dressing your displeasure up in the false robes of a coward’s apathy. Because guess what, if you didn’t care, you would not bother to let us know.

If you don’t understand why it is important, imagine how recognised, represented and inspired it would make you feel if a pig ignorant tw@t who writes sh*t emails got called up to your national team. It would tell you that you, yes you, as a pig ignorant tw@t who writes sh*t emails might also be able to make it one day, because whatever structural obstacles, institutional barriers, or culturally-ingrained biases had previously prevented pig ignorant tw@ts who write sh*t emails from representing your national team had, for the first time, been circumvented, allowing other pig ignorant tw@ts who write sh*t emails to believe that there may also be a place for them too.
D*cky Malb@lls