What formation were Sunderland playing against Leicester City?
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 as that seems to be kind of the approach that he took to kind of put men behind the ball and hit Leicester on the counter-attack at times.
00:06 But as we mentioned before, Sunderland didn't have Jack Clarke, they didn't have Patrick Roberts to come off the bench and didn't kind of maybe have that attacking output to come on and change the game and to hurt Leicester, even though they were defending in numbers.
00:18 Yeah, I found some things online really disingenuous, actually, because I've seen some comments saying, you know, what formation was Sunderland were playing?
00:25 You can't tell. It's really hard to tell.
00:27 To be honest, I actually thought it was really easy to tell. It was a flat back five pretty much with the wing-backs sort of getting a little bit further forward.
00:33 And then it was a flat four in the middle. Chris Rigg was on the right, Joe Bellingham was mostly on the left.
00:39 Yes, in the second half, it did get a little bit more chaotic as Sunderland were chasing a goal, which is what you'd expect.
00:44 Substitutes coming on and off games do tend to get messy, but I actually thought it was really obvious what Mike Dodds thought to do.
00:50 I thought the formation was really obvious. Whether it worked is a completely different question.
00:55 What I will say, and it again goes back to the striking issue, I think Sunderland did set out to do sort of two banks of four initially.
01:03 But the gap between that four in midfield and Hemi was absolutely to the point where if Sunderland wanted to play to Hemi, they probably wouldn't have been able to anyway.
01:13 So it's a very strange sort of disconnect there for me.
01:18 And again, you mentioned, Joe, it is about personnel. I mean, Clarke would have really helped the team.
01:23 So would have Roberts. Again, I think I mentioned on the podcast last week, it does feel like a perfect storm in that regard.
01:30 So I didn't really have many problems with the way Mike Dodds sort of set up against Leicester.