Dave Woods

Fri 29 November 2019 11:55, UK

This article is part of a regular series from Leeds United Twitter account All Stats Aren’t We – the team also host a brilliant podcast that goes in-depth into the tactics of Marcelo Bielsa and a deeper look at the underlying stats

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• Leeds United v Middlesbrough
• Saturday, 3pm

So, Middlesbrough. An interesting team in terms of where they’re at in their history if not on the way they play. This is not meant to be offensive. They have a new manager who is himself a new manager. You might know him—Jonathan Woodgate? Yes?

Anyway, Woodgate has been tweaking around with his team all season. They started out with a 4-1-4-1, shifted to a 4-2-3-1 and, sometime in October, decided that a 3-5-2 was the way forward.

We find this intriguing for a couple of reasons: firstly, they have played in this formation seven times since they first adopted it and have won only one of those games – on Wednesday night in a 1-0 win against rock-bottom Barnsley.

Why persist with an experimental formation for so long if it wasn’t giving the results you might have wanted? Of course, Woodgate might have liked what he saw… but this brings us onto a second issue.

Boro have something of an injury crisis going on with their centrebacks at the moment. In fact, in the last two games, they’ve played Jonny Howson—remember him?—in the back three.

Why, you might ask, would Woodgate not just switch his formation to suit what players he had available? Yes, he did get a win against Barnsley. But surely there are easier ways?

Here’s the 3-5-2 as it appeared on Wednesday:

(You have to get over the fact they have a player called Dijksteel. Honestly. It’s not pronounced anything like you think it is in Dutch.)

The midfield three is curious: Marcus Tavernier has played upfront at times this season; Paddy McNair has played as a centre back in his career; Lewis Wing is a play-maker and ball carrier.

Between the three of them, they are fairly fluid. Out of possession, they tend to form a double pivot with Tavernier in front of them:

In possession, McNair pushes forward and Wing tends to be the fulcrum through which the ball moves:

Out of possession, as you can see from the graphic above, Boro move from a high press with the front two and Tavernier, into a mid-block with the wing backs dropping deeper to help out the back three:

As you can see, the ball-near wing back will press and the ball-far wing back will drop into a situational back four.

Going forward, Boro like to use their wide area and break at speed as their wing backs decompress. Their second goal against Hull last weekend is a case in point:

The ball starts off with Lewis Wing, is moved out to Marvin Johnson who moves it quickly forward to Britt Assombalonga who lets it pass him to Ashley Fletcher. Fletcher then plays a one-two with his strike partner, runs around the keeper and slots home.

Rapid play in the wide area with the wing back and strikers interacting. That is what Boro will be looking to do.

Of course, it stands to reason that Boro won’t be enjoying quite so much possession when they play Leeds. And unfortunately for Leeds, they’ll be playing the same formation that Reading used mid-week and cause Leeds all kinds of problems.

Transposing the line-up Leeds played against Reading onto this Middlesbrough team we get this:

Obviously, Roberts is not fit and so we will see a different line-up. Before you all crucify us.

We also need to make a note about the way that Klich and Dallas played on Tuesday. Dallas seemed to have been tasked with marking Swift out of the game and this meant that Klich tended to drift ball-far given that Swift is the important cog in Reading’s machinery.

The result was that Swift was kept out of the game but the extra space afforded to Ovie Ejaria meant that he shone.

With Middlesbrough, their pivot is Lewis Wing. Expect Dallas to do a similar job with him. However, Paddy McNair and Marcus Tavernier are not as dangerous a second option as Ejaria. Tavernier will be marked by Phillips.

Jamie Shackleton is back to fitness so our guess would be that Klich will be moved up into the 10 spot to replace Roberts and Shack will be played as the other wing back:

Alternatively, if Bielsa feels as though the game on Tuesday was too stodgy, he may push Hernandez into the 10 position and play Costa as a right winger.

The Reading game was so clunky mainly because Reading sat deep with a back five. That deprived Harrison of space and so Leeds’ tactics of overloading on the right to isolate him on the left proved fruitless.

The inclusion of Helder Costa could offer a more direct opportunity on the right and could be worth the gamble. Bielsa gonna Bielsa, though.

We wish we could say that we thought this game would be exciting. We don’t. Think similar to the Reading game. Brace yourselves.

In other Leeds news, 19y/o turns heads – 3 things we learned from U23s in 2-0 win v Wigan