Tactical Notes (Everton)

Shaun Calvert gives an illustrated breakdown of where Everton found overloads in midfield against Ipswich and offers some sympathy to Kalvin Phillips and Sam Morsy.

Post-game on Saturday, I started thinking about how our set-up and tactics against Everton affected the game and specifically how the Toffees exploited them, got control of the game and played through us so easily. It ties in with our out of possession game down the left.

The crux of the issue is as follows. When Everton had possession, mainly in their final third, Kalvin Phillips appeared to be tasked with marking/keeping an eye on Dwight McNeil and preventing the ball going into Everton’s number ten.

As McNeil was playing so high, just off Dominic Calvert-Lewin, this meant he was playing very deep, more or less creating a five versus four between our back line and their top line).

This meant that Mr Morsy was slightly higher up and was trying to get close to Idrissa Gana Gueye, but Gueye started dropping deeper and played on a different line to his partner, Abdoulaye Doucouré.

As a result, this left Jack Clarke with the task of trying to cover both Ashley Young and Doucouré, as well as dropping in to help Leif Davis cope with Everton right-winger Jack Harrison at times.

This made it look like the distances amongst our front 6 were too big at times, as we were pulled out of shape by simple movements. This left us chasing shadows, with Everton always having an overload.

Credit to Everton to recognising and exploiting this and thus not always going long, easily building up though the pitch at times. Then, when they got their noses in front (especially after the second goal) they were happy to just sit-in and let us have the ball in front them.

In this image from first couple of minutes, you can see Phillips tracking McNeill across the pitch:

A few minutes later, again Phillips is with McNeil and Mr Morsy has pushed onto Gueye and has left Doucouré with all the space in the Ipswich left midfield area.

Here’s another example twenty minutes in of Phillips going to track McNeil and this allowing Everton easily to play through the pitch with Mr. Morsy high and isolated between Doucouré and Gueye.

I am guessing that there were probably several reasons why we decided to do this, rather than going man for man, when Everton had the ball.

If a team is predominantly going to go ‘long’ from the back anyway, then why look to press them high up when numbers could potentially be used more effectively deeper in the pitch?

Did McKenna have concerns over leaving four versus four at the back, especially with Calvert-Lewin and McNeil against Woolfenden and Burgess?

Was this Plan B or C, with Plan A potentially being to play man-to-man with a central partnership of Dara O’Shea and Jacob Greave… which then had to be re-thunk when Greaves got injured… and then once again, a day before the game, when Johnson got injured?

If there was a late change of plan, did this mean that some players were less comfortable with their roles and there wasn’t enough time to get them drilled?

I believe that had this been seen as someone not doing what they were being asked in the first half, then we would have seen a tactical time out or different instructions given during the half.

To summarise:

Even though it may appear as though someone in the team isn’t doing their job well, hasn’t had a good game, looks out of position or “doesn’t have the legs”, it may be down to the job that they are being asked to do or just a knock-on effect from the team’s tactics or another individual’s job, which then affects theirs.

Also, although we all think that McKenna is a tactical genius, he is now coming up against very experienced coaches … and teams with better, more experienced players.

Moving onto today’s, if the Brentford first team play set-up anything like their U21s did on Thursday night then it’s going to be a fascinating afternoon.

They basically played a back 3/5, but in possession they built up in 2-3-5 in a really fluid formation with lots of rotations.

This included their two wing backs pushed high and wide onto their top line, their right centre back playing in midfield (even at right wing at times), a midfielder dropping into the back line, their number nine dropping really deep and plenty of runners going beyond him.

Then there’s the set-pieces too. Plenty of variations but they did love to play a short routine and look to pull Ipswich out of their set shape, working themselves into better areas for better goal-scoring opportunities.