My take on what went wrong this season (and it is not just ‘bad signings’)

Two seasons ago it became clear that Farkeball was going to be tough in the prem because we got punished for our openness when we lost the ball. Had we had proper defenders maybe we would have been a bit more competitive but dominating possession in the prem with a cut price team is tough, and evidence suggests that it didn’t work.

When we got relegated there was a choice. Stick with Farkeball or change the system. We decided to stick with Farkeball and try to bounce back immediately. Farke tweaked the formation to the double pivot (Skipp + Kenny / Rupp) which made it a bit more solid. We hung on to Emi. There was a fundamentally short-term primary aim to get promotion, built around two players we would not have the following season.

Then when we got promoted, Farke (presumably) decided to change the formation to 4-3-3 and try a different approach in the prem. The players recruited were intended for this system. It’s why we bought wide forwards not strikers. It was quite frankly INSANE to change the formation at the start of a Prem season to a system that we had never used before and with a relatively unproven youngster at the heart of the team (Gilmour) and a load of other new players bedding in.
For a smaller club to do well in the premier league, the team need to be more than the sum of its parts. Lambert era Norwich are a great example. It is about having a system and style that brings the best out of the players. It is the reason that Brentford have done OK this year. There has been a continuity of style with a few higher quality additions.

Arguably what we actually needed to do was make more fundamental changes to system in the championship which would enable us to compete in the Prem. To build a new team and different style. E.g. we could have played 4-3-3 last season. Or the three at the back system that had worked well in previous cup games against Arsenal and Chelsea. We needed to learn to be more solid in the championship and not always rely on possession as the main form of defence. The risk here of course is that we might not end up getting promoted as there would have been a period of transition.

So, I would suggest that the reason this season is a disaster is that we rapidly tried to change style, with a bunch of new players, and it all went tits up. We knew that Farkeball didn’t work in the prem but we didn’t adequately develop an alternative approach. The most annoying thing is that was a chance that Farkeball 2.0 might have worked a bit better: with two really decent holding players and an Emi replacement might just have worked and enabled us to maintain some momentum from last season. But we will never know because they abandoned it before it had been properly tried out.

TLDR: Farkeball is great in the Champ but crap in the Prem. We didn’t come up with proper plan for dealing with this because we prioritised getting back up ASAP.

Posted By: Knitted Jesus, Mar 31, 08:23:44