Pellegrini and his tactics

Just watching the Sunday Supplement with 3 excellent journalists on this morning:

Patrick Barclay, Oliver Kay and Martin Samuel.

They were discussing LVG and why United aren't playing well, especially as LVG is known for his attacking teams.

They were saying that when he was developing the excellent young players at Ajax, Terry Venables used to always watch Ajax and what LVG was doing with his tactics and how he got the best formations to attack and score goals.

Interestingly, Barclay and Samuel said that his philosophy was always simple and he said:

"I try to get away with the least amount of defensive players on the pitch that I can"..."use the least amount of ball rotations to get into scoring positions"

He's adopted this at all the clubs he's been at and generally, been very successful at it. For some reason it's not working at United.

They then went on to say how Rogers has pretty much changed his approach over the past 4 months to adopt a similar philosophy - with him using a 3-4-3.

Straight away I thought of MP. It's almost as if he has the complete opposite philosophy...."try to get as many defensive players on the pitch at any one time"

His constant persistence of having our usual 4 defenders and 2 CDMF's.....so basically, that's 6 defensive players against 3 of Liverpool's or Ajax, or Barca etc.

And we actually wonder why our football is slow, lethargic and easy to defend and press high against....and we seem to take 100 passes to get into a scoring position.

Thing is, I don't get why it's not working at United, because they've always had an attacking philosophy.

Also, I don't think any of us wonder why we're so ponderous.  I think we're all more baffled by why we play like that when we've got so much attacking potential and a manager whose first six months saw us notch up over 50 goals and put most teams to the sword.