Postecoglou’s first game in charge of Nottingham Forest has to be assessed in a measured fashion given he is one week into the job and facing an Arsenal side almost six years into their project.<\/p>\n
The Australian has had limited time to put his stamp on this Forest side but a few differences were evident pointing to the direction Postecoglou might look to take Forest.<\/p>\n
The most obvious was starting with a back four. It appears the 4-4-1-1 that Postecoglou has deployed across his career is to be maintained.<\/p>\n
Stylistically, Forest aimed to build in a slower fashion – looking to establish territory higher up the pitch, rather than playing the more direct, counter-attacking style that was successful last season. Data from Opta showed that their ‘direct speed’ – how quickly they move the ball from defence to attack – was their joint-lowest for a game in the league since the start of last season.<\/p>\n
Out of possession, they set up in what looked like a 4-2-3-1 shape and defended in a man-marking fashion. We will have to see more from Postecoglou to know if this man-to-man approach defensively is something they persist with or if this was specific to Arsenal given their quality and rotation-heavy style.<\/p>\n
Nuno by comparison tended to set Forest up in a zonal fashion (meaning each player defended specific zones, rather than following individual players) but did use a man-to-man defence at times against the league’s top teams.<\/p>\n
Forest’s defensive line was set higher up the pitch than under Nuno, but they were punished for this with Gyokeres’ strike. Arsenal exploited a long pass over the top of the defence for Eze to run on to as Forest failed to apply pressure on the passer. Naturally, Forest’s collective understanding of when to push up and apply pressure will improve with time.<\/p>\n
Lastly, the biggest difference between Postecoglou’s tactics today with how he has set up his teams at previous clubs was the use of full-backs. In build-up, Forest played in a fairly standard 4-3-3 shape with full-backs starting in wide positions rather than inverting into midfield as has been the norm in his sides. Was this a short-term tactic given the lack of preparation time?<\/p>\n
It is difficult to make any definitive conclusions based on a single game in Postecoglou’s first week in charge; however there were numerous new ideas at play against Arsenal that may become more evident in upcoming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Postecoglou’s first game in charge of Nottingham Forest has to be assessed in a measured fashion given he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-140680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}