The point of playing Gómez is that he is to be the focal point of our attacking impetus, i.e. our play should be going through him. Now when he gets the ball, there is little point in having players who will run away from him towards the byline, whereas when they are moving infield on their preferred foot, it allows for nimble through balls and one-twos.
Also, getting balls into the box from wide would surely be folly without a player who can head the ball in there?
As for width, I imagine that the idea is that Melchiot and Figueroa supply it – which I suspect is the reason we play with two holding midfielders, so that the full-backs have more scope to get forward. It worked well against Villa, but I don’t think we’ve been able to utilise it since because we’ve been so awful.
Like I said before the season started, playing so narrowly is admirable and does provide the more ‘beautiful’ football, but unless you have an exceptional player playing where Gómez does, it falls apart quickly because opposition defences will just defend very narrowly and space in the middle will be hard to come by – which is largely what has happened so far.
