Interview – Kelvin Travers – Fantasy Premier League Runner-Up

it will be pretty much the same team maybe 1-2 changes atmost

We no longer reply to you, just give you a voteup 😀

great post. But you have missed an important point. In the modern game, it's all about possession, hence the extra man in midfield. Having this allows you to take your time and open up a team to allow the goalscorer his chance. it also deprives the other team of that thing you need to have to score, I think they call it a ball

4 middies plus 2 forwards -- in any formation -- create a 6-on-4 advantage on offense. Teams don't have more strikers because they rarely come back to play defense, as they're needed to score goals, as you say.

it is attacking by the whole team, not only one player.

unless you are playing foosball.

This is the biggest load of nonsense I've bothered to read in a long time 🙂

I agree with you, and its why I advocate wingbacks and sweepers massively. Technically members of the defence but add massive pressure to the attack and can also provide an extra body up front if needed. If disciplined properly there is no reason why it should leave you open at the back.

I tend to think that these teams that play say a 4-2-3-1 effectively play with four 'forwards'.

e.g Hazard and Mata for Chelsea. Also at times United played RvP, Welbeck and Rooney.

4-4-2 is an antique.

Umm I think mids such as xavi, iniesta, silva, pirlo,etc are also the ones people come to see.

also while your logic on a basic level seems sound, you're ignoring the tactical significance. certain setups and formations trump others.

and don't forget the 4231 formation. while you only have one true forward but it allows you to employ skillful wingers and attacking mids such as ronaldo, ozil, di maria, mata, hazard, etc.

have clicked the notify me of replies on this post?

At senior level, I often play a variant of a 4-3-3, however the 2 full backs push into wide mids when attacking, with holding CM sitting in front of CMs.

You do need good strikers, with fitness and work ethic especially for the 2 wider strikers (inside forwards) to cover any full back pushing forward, but going forward the formation is capable of goals, but equally it can be a counter attackers dream.

Formations are irrelevant in many cases as quality of player and ability to retain the ball is the most critical aspects, as the chasing teams will often make a mistake & the quality players will make the possession count with one great finish or pass.

Winning 1-0 = 3 points
Winning 5-4 = 3 points but whilst entertaining can lead to heart failure!!

Football is great as its all about opinions, none are right and none wrong, but on any given day 11 v11 the best team should win!

I think the point that only Hansen celebrates good defending and that teams dont celebrate is so wide of the mark and fairly irrelevant. I can safely say all team mates applaud good defending in the dressing room as do managers. And good defenders command as much respect from fellow pros for their talents.

formations and positions nowadays are more fluid then they were in back in the day - for example players are expected to get involved with more phases of play then they did before - leading to greater variety of formations - now we have wingers come forwards such as walcott, 'in the hole' attacking midfielders such as michu that are neither midfielders nor forwards and so on

Along similar lines to JK, I'd say reducing it to attack v defence is the source of the confusion.

I don't think it's that teams have become less attacking, quite the opposite. The difference is that everyone has been sucked into the midfield. Fullbacks and strikers. The congested midfield is one of the defining features of the modern game.

The formation names are misleading because fullbacks play so high and attacking midfielders are often forwards in reality (hence the mentions of the 'front four'). Hence 4-2-3-1 becomes more like 2-4-4. This is actually what the classic Brazilian 4-2-4 is if you do the same for it.

Football is cyclical.

Strange then that the number of goals scored per game has been climbing steaddily for a long time now...Formations these days are simply convenient hooks for us punters and the media to hang our hats on...the game is far more fluid than that...see comments above...

Numbers do not tell the whole story. Back in the Fifties and Sixties, teams were always listed in a 2-3-5 formation. But the midfield would consist of a stopper centre-half (a defensive midfielder who played in front of the two fullbacks) plus two wing halves (who were expected to cover defence as well as midfield). And the front five included two wingers who were expected to cover midfield when not attacking, and either the centre forward or the two inside forwards might be deep-lying.

Later, the stopper centre half was replaced by two central defenders (4-2-4). Meanwhile, developments such as Alf Ramsey's wingless wonders and the Dutch total football resulted in a variety of more fluid formations, with more and more of the attacking players in midfield (since the forwards might be starved of possession if the team did not control the midfield) and with fullbacks often being encouraged to join the attack as overlapping fullbacks or wingbacks instead of just being purely defensive players. It hasn't always been 4-4-2!

Having a greater number of forwards on the pitch will not result in the team scoring more goals if they never receive the ball; it is sometimes more effective to strengthen the midfield instead. But all formations have both strengths and weaknesses. If the two lines of four in a 4-4-2 are too far back then the team will have little attacking threat, but if they are further forward, or if too many of the defenders join an attack, then the team may be susceptible to quick counter-attacks by the opposition. It's not easy to get the balance right.

4-2-3-1 is what English football should be teaching from the ground level up now, if we want to beat the silky spainards.

GK

DEF DEF DEF DEF

DM DM

RW AM/SS LW

CF

Wingers tuck in when required in defence, wide in possession. Fullbacks bomb on and wingers drop deep. Our future English players have to play like this. Suddenly a good winger is golden. Look at Bayern, two fantastic wingers and mobile full backs. 4-4-2 is dead unless you have a team full of intelligent players with good positional sense.

Anyone agree, and to what extent?

What an interesting thought process. I do hope that we keep this thread going, I'd like to see how this discussion develops. You've put up quite a lot of open-ended questions in your post, so do bear with me if I spend a bit too much time on answering them, because they're based on vastly different aspects of the game.

Regarding 4-4-2 and the death of it, you must first keep in mind that the "battles" across the pitch are a lot more segregated than we think, especially when you consider attacking and defensive transitions.

Personally, I disagree with the notion that you need a numerical advantage to breach a defense. What people don't know about 4-4-2 versus 4-4-2 is that when this battle was very prominent in the early 90s/2000s (especially in the British leagues) the 2 strikers are generally locked in "individual" battles with the 2 central defenders, whether trying to outpace/outwit them or just beating them in the air. Full-backs usually dealt with wingers directly 1v1, which resulted in the "excitement" of wingers pulling off tricks or skinning a fullback such as Ryan Giggs, Kanchelskis and Ginola etc.

But to answer the question directly, the death of a 2-striker system arose when the "space between the lines" was utilised more effectively; Second strikers, who were either a striker with extreme technique or a midfielder who had a "real eye for goal" utilised that space particularly well, e.g. players like Zola off Hasselbaink. If a central defender were to push forward to mark the second striker, it allowed the remaining striker (who usually was pacy) free reign to outpace or outmuscle his opponent, which was a disadvantage largely to a defender.

Having said that, my advocate here is "utilisation of space" that only recently modern football has developed: The "Makelele" role only was coined due to teams needing someone specifically to nullify this threat, because chucking more forwards in a more offensive area of the pitch would (A) expose you more to counterattacks, (B) run a risk of you not having as much possession and (C) be completely redundant because the offensive players would not get enough "service".

After reading the replies to this post, most are advocating systems that win matches, which is the point of the game really. I'd go as far as saying that the philosophy advocated IN THIS POST is fundamentally flawed, if not insufficiently backed up.

As to the topic of awards, TV, and accepting what is the most important part of football, what we don't realise is that we are only exposed to a "select few" that dominate our media, due to whatever reasons that people have mentioned before that has nothing to do with football.

Couple this with the nature of football matches which are "result" oriented games, it's far likelier to score consistently than to keep shutouts/defend consistently in order to gain recognition. The game gravitates towards them because the audience can only pay attention for so long; A goal only takes "a moment of magic" which is much easier to publicise than a defense or a defensive player who performs tackles and interceptions for 90 minutes. To put it quite concisely, offensive metrics are far, far easier to MARKET than defensive ones.

And with the final question, I'd like to advocate again that it's not about the number of strikers on the field (I seriously hope you're not arguing along those lines); it's about utilisation of advantages, or "mismatches" in basketball terms if you play it, scoring goals whether through overrunning a team via possession or effective set piece routines.

I hope this passed the message across effectively enough. Very willing to answer any other questions, I'm very chatty 😛