Malouda chalkboard

We lost on Saturday for many reasons, but one of these was our failure to control Florent Malouda.

If you look at chalkboards much you’ll notice that it’s quite rare for players to actually make successful passes into the penalty area.  Fulham players almost never do it, but nor do a lot of the big teams either.  Defences are well drilled and tend not to allow this to happen.

Which makes the Malouda board interesting.   He found a Chelsea player inside the box on six occasions, and tried to do it three other times.  That’s crazy:  you don’t see this very often.   Yet here we see Malouda running riot.

I think part of this is the old story with numbers in attack.  If you have two players in attack, as we frequently do, defenders can cover them and any runners.  If, like Chelsea, you throw a lot of players into the box at great speed then it’s much harder for defences to pick them up.    But ultimately Malouda was a huge threat and we didn’t contain him well enough.

The other half of the chalkboard is Mikel Jon Obi’s passing.   There are 82 passes there, and only one went astray.  I have no problem with sitting off centre-backs and making them take the initiative – we do this well and it allows us to keep our shape – but what’s happening with Mikel here?   Can we really have been instructed to sit off him too?  They were all passes in the middle of the pitch, so nothing hurt us directly, but the fact that he was this untroubled is interesting.