Brede Hangeland player of the month… but….

look what advert turned up on the page?   Hovis.   Which is what some people were nicknaming him when he joined (Brede/Bread/Hovis).   Spooky.

Dempsey part 4

Adam’s series continues.

Pressure

See, there is method to my madness.   I spent a lot of time harping on about pinning Bolton back with Johnson’s pace and a high defensive line, and, to make the point nicely, here (and I’m turning into a one trick pony aren’t I?) are the Telegraph’s density maps.   We’re at the top, shooting left to right.

Points to note:

Bolton’s centre-backs – how deep?    ‘The book’ says that you need to keep compact, with your defence and your midfield quite close together.   Bolton lost their shape completely.  We expect to see full-backs forward of centre-backs (see Fulham), but not like this.

Not unrelated:  Andy Johnson!   I couldn’t have asked for a better map to show what I had tried to explain last week, but look how far forward he played.   Bolton were clearly afraid to push up (when they did he creamed them down the channels), so ended up sitting far too deep (Gary Megson said as much in a post match interview).   This gave us the platform we needed to do our stuff.   Time and again you could see Hangeland and Hughes standing on the half way line as the game was played exclusively in the Bolton half.  It’s part of how you dominate games, and Fulham played their cards well.  The Telegraph have another chart that helps me illustrate this:

We were winning the ball 35 metres from our own goal; Bolton 24 metres.   That, on the surface, would appear to be pretty huge (against Arsenal we won the ball 20 metres from goal (Arsenal won the ball 27 metres from goal against us)), against Hull 29 (v 25)), so a very good sign and something to keep an eye on in the future.   It might be a useful stat to track this, actually:  let’s call it +11 and see what happens from here.

Zoltan Gera:  played quite forward.  I noticed this on the day; the other three midfielders seemed to be relatively close on the right, which usually made a lot of space for Gera on the other flank.   I can picture at least two really nice balls from Murphy that switched the play and brought Gera into the game and in space.   On the same theme, if you’ve got Murphy, Bullard, Davies, Zamora and Johnson all close together, passing quickly and precisely, that’s going to be hard to defend, especially with the threat Johnson now brings.

Finally, another word for John Paintsil, who was massively involved again.