We were a one man team under Gerrard for the first 2 seasons, when Alfie played, we played and we struggled when he wasn’t on form. Typically he would lose form towards the middle/end of a season because we were playing a lot of games and he isn’t naturally super-fit.
So Gerrard and his team decided to drop him further back in an effort to reduce our reliance on him, and get more from Hagi and Kent whilst adding Roofe into the mix.
And in a lot of ways you would have to say they succeeded, because Alfie was honking for large swathes of last season and we went undefeated in the league.
However we never saw us hitting the heights of say, Porto away using that system.
And I think that’s the conundrum for Gio.
Alfie needs to be up top, bullying defenders, playing on the shoulder, getting a shot off every time the ball comes to him within 20yds of the goal, when he does that, he becomes a 20m player again.
Gio needs to find a way to facilitate that, whilst getting the most out the AMs behind Alfie, so if he does have a stinker, others can step up.
People have been crying out for us to use a 4231 for a long time and I think you can see the start of something last night.
Kent can play out wide on his own, and his pace and mobility allow him to cover enough grass so he doesn’t get isolated. But his finishing hasn’t improved in his time here and I don’t ever see him becoming prolific.
But on the other side of the pitch Hagi, Aribo, Roofe, Wright and Sakala would all get isolated often in our 433 and lacked either the mobility or movement to contribute to the best of their ability.
Playing two holding midfielders and a number 10 gives us another attacking player in there to get close to the two wingers, get close to Alfie, get us playing one touch whilst on the transition, instead of once the opponent has lined up their low block and hopefully gets us back to playing exciting football whilst getting the best out of the players we have.