West Brom away

We’re definitely not playing Andy Johnson (suspended) and possibly not playing Bobby Zamora (ill), so perhaps this will see Roy employ a slight variation on the previously seen 4-4-2.

Tony Mowbray has been in the press saying how he expects to station a man in front of the WBA back four to help throttle our midfield, and a man behind our midfield to take advantage of that wide, wide gap. All very sensible. We’re the away team, what do we do?

Who knows, but this seems like an ideal opportunity to try a 4-5-1. Dickson Etuhu isn’t ready, Leon Andreasen and Andranik didn’t set the world on fire against Burnley, but nevertheless, an approach aimed at stiffening our occasionally lightweight midfield seems like a sensible approach. The charts below are the Telegraph’s density maps from three 4-5-1 games last season. The players with red squares are the midfield ‘3′.

No real pattern there, except that the midfield is obviously reinforced numerically. I don’t recall this helping especially during the games in question, but there’s no doubt that extra people in the middle of the park should be helpful, especially against a team like West Brom who will try to pass the ball around. One thing that strikes me about the above is that the extra midfielder isn’t really ’shielding’ as such, more joining in with everyone else. Probably a personnel issue (we don’t have a natural shielding player) but quite interesting nevertheless. Certainly Andreasen runs around like a dog just released from its lead. Indeed, Danny Murphy was the deepest of the midfielders when we played this way.

I don’t know what any of this means, and Roy’s current approach seems to be that we should play the same way every week and back ourselves to do this at a level conducive to getting a result, but perhaps tomorrow’s circumstances dictate some minor shift in policy. We shall see.