Voorhesian

It is a defensive formation. It covers for a weak defense. Offensively it stifles creativity as the three forward players crowd into a narrow front with the wingbacks lobbing crosses in. There is a reason that every elite team other than PSG do not use it.

What is it with you guys and wingbacks. You assume every formation has a wing back, it's as if Tuchel has left some permanent brain parasite. @coco suggested a 4231 with CP as an outside mid. That is a traditional wing role, not a wing back. Alsas though, potter went with a 3421. Best of luck with that.

I have to ask, did Pulisic screw your wife or something?

Ahem. How about ditching the idea of wing-backs altogether. With so many natural wingers/outside mids on the team, forcing someone to play wingback seems counter intuitive. Its not like the position is used much by other elite teams. Just a thought.

Under Tuchel, "taking on defenders and beating them" was not the wingers job, You could see it game in and game out, the attacking payers job was to show backwards for a pass from the pivot, pass the ball to another midfielder, and make either a dummy run wide (which never worked because defenders always knew it was a decoy), or move into a channel hoping for a through ball. Show again, rinse, repeat. No one ever played as a traditional attacking winger. Width came almost exclusively from wing backs played by guys who would be outside backs on other squads, who would drive to the flag, looking to loop a cross in along the way. They were not asked to try to get in behind the defense, The fact that this pattern was repeated over and over again, with very little alteration, tells you that this was coached, The philosophy is that through such constant motion of off ball runs into the box, you could get overlaps in tight spaces and get a ball in on goal. It never came from aggressive one-v-one play. The only time you saw a player beat someone off a dribble, was to create space for the next pass.

How is this a valid comparison at all. Toussard is six years older than Pulisic, and a sizable percentage of his 96 career goals came playing in the second tier of Belgian football. He did not start scoring in the top tier of the Belgian league until he was 23 (same age as Pulisic is now) and even then was scoring at rates similar to what Pulisic is doing in the far more difficult EPL. He arrived in the EPL when he was 25 and scored all of five goals on 31 appearances in all competitions. In comparison, Public's first year in the EPL he was 20, and he scored 11 goals in all competitions (9 league) on 30 appearances. I'm digressing here, but everyone on this forum complains about lack of output, but they fail to take age into account. Pulisic's first year at Chelsea he outperformed Hazard, Salah, Stearling, Thieryy Henry and most other wingers I could find when they were twenty. To be fair, Hazard did have a breakout hear in France when he was 21, but his first year in the EPL at age 22, he scored same number of league goals that Pulisic did in his first EPL year, and only two more non-league goals than Pulisc. Heck, when Drogba was 20, he was playing in the second tier of France, and scoring exactly zero goals. The last two seasons have been injury plagued years, spent mostly in a system that does not favor a traditional winger. If you don't think system matters, look at Henry's career. When he was 22, he was playing for Juventus in a 3 back system where he was often asked to play wing-back. (Sound familiar?) At Juventus he scored all of 3 goals. The next year he moved to Arsenal, where he played in a system that was better suited for his skill set, and he scored 26 goals in all competitions. Can Pulisic eventually become as good as these players? Is batman a transvestite? Who knows. Nobody on this forum does, that's for sure. It may be he turns out like Alexander Pato, a guy whose graham cracker-like hamstrings destroyed his career. He may recover and have a great career. More likely, he ends up with good career numbers, better than Toussard, somewhere below the Hazards, Salahs, and Henrys of the world. It is just too early to tell.

I'm not sure how anyone can be so surprised, Tuchel didn't last any longer at PSG or Dortmund. He has a well deserved reputation of being so prickly that he is next to impossible to work with. What I do not understand is making Potter your number one replacement choice. He runs a system nearly identical to Tuchel's, and will have the same problem of forcing players to play out of position. Also, press accounts state that Boehley stepped in and blocked the transfer of Pulisic because he did not want to lose the U.S. audience. That's idiotic. First and foremost, that ship has sailed. Leeds has an American manager, and two national team starters who have been playing well. So it is Leeds that gets the top spot on U.S. television with Chelsea relegated to the same streaming service that plays all of the other EPL matches. Second, by keeping Pulisic locked to a team that does not match his skill set, and forces him to ride the bench will do nothing than draw the continued ire of your countrymen who will flock to other teams to watch. To be clear, I make these statements as an outside observer. I have lurked on this forum for a while because I follow USMNT players. I do the same for Leeds, Juventus, Fulham, and Dortmund. The only team I really care about is Sacramento Republic, who plays in the second tier of U.S. Soccer Football. (But we are playing tonight in the final of the U.S. equivalent of the F.A. Cup after beating three MLS teams: Go Republic.) So I really do not have an emotional stake in this. I was just put off by the notion of keeping the U.S.'s highest profile player locked to a team where his skills do not fit the system at all, and it is clear that he has little chance of succeeding there. If I were Moroccan, I would be equally as pissed at how Ziyech is being held against his will.

Its a little deeper than that. This team has all the hallmarks of a team that is "over-coached" in the sense that there is a such fear of going off script and inducing coaching ire, that players lose their creative instincts. I'll use one example to explain my point. Against West Ham, there were multiple instances of an attacking player passing the ball back and then making an angled run to space on the outside of the pitch. Pulisic must have done it 10 to 15 times, Stearling at least six, and there were others. Each time that happened, not once was the ball played onto the open space for the attacker to go get, and thus have an opportunity to attack the goal with the defense off balance. Instead, every single time, the ball was then played back into the center, just above the box. Since there were multiple different players doing this, it was obviously a coached sequence. In the abstract the play has merit, the angled run to the outside should drag a defender wide and create space for the ball to be played from the central position to a more central run. However it only works if the defender does go with the initial angled run. If the ball never goes to the runner, there is nothing to keep the defender honest, and they will simply let the runner go and cheat to the center; which is exactly what happened. No player appeared willing to break script and actually play it to the open space, when that was the play to make because the defenders were ignoring the runner. I have seen this fear of pissing a coach off with many youth teams over the years, but never have I seen signs of it in professional ranks. But the symptoms are all there. The result is very little creativity, and the appearance of players being mere "passengers," which in effect they are. If you want aggressive movement of the ball up the field quickly, players must be given the freedom to take chances, break script, without fear of being berated if it doesn't work out.