Stevie Cooper

[Salvatore Matrecano]

I would of thought away from home you'd use a deep sitting fast counter attacking tactic especially as we do have fast front players but what do I know.

This is exactly what we do use, we have the deepest average position for our defense in the league, with MGW and Brennan kept high to counter. Surely you arent thinking we're trying to play possession football having watched us play away from home. 

The issue is no one in our defense wants to bring the ball out and our midfield plays it too safe by basically playing as a second set of CB's, so theyre not there to progress the ball either. Last year we had Garner moving the ball quickly or Spence bringing it out, but theres no one who can do either this season.

I mean just look at how deep our team was vs Leeds, Freuler and Mangala both about 2m infront of the CB's!

Thanks. Thats a useful way to look at it. The way I see it there are 3 possibilities for the above:

1. The Central midfielders we have are poor and can’t pass for toffee and we are therefore not progressing the ball out of defence whatever instructions/tactics they may receive.

2. The central midfield is OK and could play further forwards but the defence is poor and Cooper’s tactic is for the midfield to help them out otherwise we would leak a hatful of goals.

3. The defence is fine, the midfield is fine, the tactics are wrong. If we played further forward we would be winning more games.

Which is it? 
My opinion its probably a combination of 1 and 2.
Evidence from early in the season is we tried No.3 and got spanked every time.