What Improvements Can Be Made?

Just a general thread on what improvements can be made to our performances. Please leave out the roberto/whelan bashing otherwise I’d prefer the mods to close the thread.

I personally think we need to take it back to basic 4-4-2 football. Simply on the fact that I’ve noticed that when we are chasing a game we seem to do a whole lot better when we push up and when we nearly have 2 out and out attackers and 4 across the midfield. So if our performance improves like this when we are chasing, I think it should be adapted from the start. I think a lot of the problem stems from not having men in the box when balls are going in. It is very difficult to score from outside the box all the time.

I think I would set it up 4-4-2 with the following squad when fit – habsi, boyce, alcaraz, caldwell/lopez, figs, stam (playing right midfield), mccarthy, gomez, moses, di santo/rodellage, mcmanaman/sammon.

I was intially thinking that go against the norm and put more defensive minded players in left and right midfield areas so jones and stam and have more attacking players in the centre as we tend to do most of our attacking through the centre anyway.

I believe our forwards can score but not as a lone striker. The likes of sammon would be more suited to the van nistleroy approach and just lurch around the box, as with mcmanaman. Then your second striker like di santo and rodellega can be the ones that get into all areas cause problems with their pace…they also need to be told to don’t panic or stay calm when they are about to shoot as it comes across as they rush themselves and often put the ball blazing over.

Defensively, caldwell and alcaraz just need to be more aware not to foul players and not to lose the head. They need to be aware that they dont have the speed therefore don’t stay too tight to their men. We’ve been caught out like this before! Caldwell needs to play a bigger part as captain and not make silly mistakes like easily fouling players in or around the box.

Probably most importantly there needs to be unity amongst our supporters. We are a small club with a small fan base and we should come together as a community. Even on these forums i’ve noticed a divide and unfriendlyness from some. I posted before looking for tickets and because I wasn’t known I was immediately called a fan of another club, when the case is Im a supporter from Ireland finding hard to get tickets as I’m not on the system. Lets face it if opposition fans wanted to get tickets to our part of the stadium it wouldn’t be that hard as we don’t fill the stands anyway. We need to put aside the martinez/whelan debates, its the way things are and you make the best of that, so put up and shut up and get behind your team. We have a young squad and we want to keep these players with us even if we face relegation and the only hope we may have of keeping them is getting behind them as a unified force and let them know we will support them no matter what. Loyality in people in the game is making a revival so we need to be aware of that.

Other thoughts and opinions…
And before the keyboard lovers post…the above is all my own opinion. I’m looking for others thoughts and opinions, not to be slated as I’ve come to expect on here.