We’ve all seen how things have gone wrong over the last few days, weeks and months and a lot of errors could be attributed to Régis Le Bris over that period.
It looks like the club are backing Le Bris for at least a little bit longer in the hope that he can figure the whole mess out and get some points on the board. Whether you agree with the decision or not, I’m sure many of you have some opinions on how he should go about changing our fortunes, and I’m no different!
So, I thought it would be fun
to have a look at some things he may consider to flip the script for the Lads in the coming weeks with the fair caveat that although I think these are fair points to raise, I believe that Le Bris is a truly gifted manager with more knowledge and experience of the game than I could ever hope to possess.
For that reason, I’ll be offering some counters to each point for a bit of balance.
Pick a style
First up for me is to pick a style and to stick to it.
To my eyes, it looks like we have no clear sense of direction or intention in our play anymore. When we have the ball, we often pass it from side to side without incision. When we don’t, we sit deeply without any quick players to counter incisively.
We’ve seemingly lost our patterns of play, our triangles and a clear way of moving through the thirds dangerously, and it looks like Le Bris is stuck between two styles at the moment.
Disregarding his first five or so games in charge wherein he employed a wonderfully intense press in the Championship, he’s has generally and successfully set us up as a defensively solid team that’s clinical in transition.
We recruited for this, as well — big defenders without much passing range, record signing Habib Diarra, whose primary attribute is carrying the ball at pace, and quick wingers that could hurt teams on the break. We soak up pressure and we punish teams for committing too much, or at least we used to.
To me, it looks like Le Bris has tried to evolve this style and introduce some more possession-based, expansive traits into our play over the last few months. You could see it starting ever since we breached our forty point target last season, and with a couple of slip-ups here and there, it was a smooth transition with impressive results.
Fast forward to the present day, though, and it’s a mess, with a a slow and tedious attack, a dreadful defensive record and a non-existent midfield.
We’re getting the worst of all worlds at the moment and I think that if Le Bris wants to succeed, he must bring it back to basics and introduce some pace for the counter or change tact altogether and find a different way for Sunderland to impose themselves on our opponents in the interests of chance creation.
Summary
Le Bris needs to commit to one style of play and stick to it in order to streamline and coordinate the players’ thought processes on the pitch.
Counter-argument
We’ve actually created more chances this year than last, but we’re just not taking them.
Le Bris can’t legislate for the players’ inexplicable lapses in concentration and poor finishing while on the pitch, and perhaps the results are making the setup of the team look worse than it is.
Refine the press
I touched on this above but regardless of which style we’re going to play going forward, we need to fix our disjointed, ineffective press.
If Coventry can play through us at a snail’s pace while four or five of our players amble after them with no sense of cohesion, we’re in trouble. This does link to the style of play, and I think it’s one of the consequences of our seemingly ill-prepared gameplans — the lads are pressing individually rather than collectively and for me, that all comes down to the manager.
We didn’t always press highly last season but if we did, it was “connected ” and it was intense.
It’s not just him, but a frequent and obvious example of this has been Granit Xhaka’s floundering on his own in the opposition’s box and leaving the defence hopelessly exposed.
It’s been criminal and, at times, a bit jarring to watch the slow-motion car crashes we cause ourselves in this manner. Le Bris needs to resurrect the joined-up and well-drilled pressing machine, otherwise we’re destined to sleepwalk into defeats regardless of our attacking play.
Summary
Tied in with the style of play, Le Bris needs to nail down our press so that it goes back to being confrontational, intense and cohesive.
Counter-argument
Not much of a counter to this one, for me.
I can appreciate that the coaching staff haven’t had many days on the training ground this season, but a team’s press is a very good way to judge the cohesion of thinking and intent behind the scenes — in our case, shockingly absent at the moment.
Shake up the starting XI
This is a big one for me, as many players are getting an easy ride at the moment despite dropping stinker after stinker.
Xhaka’s drop off in performance is well documented and while I’ll talk about him a bit later on, there are a lot of other players who have let the side down consistently and with damaging consequences yet we know that every time a Premier League game comes back around, we’re going to see all of the same faces again.
I’d name them here but if we’re being honest, it’s almost all of the starting XI from the most recent game against Coventry.
To compound the misery of the team selections, we’ve actually seen what the second string are capable of due to the sheer volume of games and the necessitation of rotation.
Jules Ahoka, Dayann Methalie, Malick Fofana, Jocelin Ta Bi and Habib Diarra (pre-re-injury) all deserve more minutes than they’re getting — if nothing else but to inject some life into a slow and tired-looking group. As it is, we’ve ended up with a dysfunctional yet undroppable XI that works for nobody and rewards complacency from the core group while ignoring impressive displays from the unfavoured.
Summary
Le Bris must start shaking things up in the Premier League starting eleven.
Good performances from the second string shouldn’t be ignored and bad performances from the starting XI (regardless of who’s delivering them) shouldn’t be rewarded with further starts.
Counter-argument
Le Bris is sticking to his tried and tested approach on the pitch and wants to keep the two squads quite separate this early in the season. This means that we rotate heavily for cup games and leave as many fit and firing for both competitions as possible.
It also continues a trend we’ve always seen from Le Bris: play through bad form, but we just haven’t needed to see it on this scale before.
Two wingers, overlapping fullbacks
This might be the most basic of the lot.
Le Bris seems to be actively shooting himself and the team in the foot by refusing to play with two wingers and/or full backs permitted to provide attacking support. Doing so would allow us to develop more threat on either flank by providing more space for wingers to cut in on their favoured foot or, alternatively, creating space for the full backs to put in a cross.
These are basic dynamics in football and something we’ve done under Le Bris before, so where have they gone?
Playing two right-footed full backs on the wing as was commonplace for months before Chris Rigg’s introduction left us with a lopsided and slow attack. It’s not much better with Rigg, either, as he’s technically gifted and hard-working but not a specialised winger capable of pacey bursts at defenders.
We’ve seen what our wingers are capable of against Brentford in the League Cup, so to continue depriving ourselves of pace and creativity in the Premier League under the guise of defensive solidity is difficult to justify on our current form.
For me, it’s critical that Le Bris finds a solution to this and it seems easy enough on paper.
Florent Ghisolfi has given him enough tools to figure something out on the wing, even if we didn’t get that standout signing on the right.
Summary
Le Bris must find a way to improve our wing play as the current setups aren’t giving us enough dynamism or threat in their current form.
Counter-argument
Again, we’re statistically creating more chances this season than last using these tactics.
Nordi Mukiele is often given heavy license to get past on the overlap which is often our most dangerous threat. Tactics involving midfielders or full backs in wide areas had worked last year in giving us more control of the game.
Protect Granit Xhaka in midfield and help Brian Brobbey
This could be a more contentious one, but I think we need to help ourselves more by covering for Xhaka’s downturn in athleticism and dynamism.
I think we’re often leaving him exposed in the middle of the park through a mixture of poor tactics, poor pressing and defensive calamities and if we can find a way to free Xhaka of needing to do as much of the dirty work as he used to, we just might find that he still has the quality we need to unlock defences. His play leading to Brobbey’s ill-placed finish against Coventry shows that he has the vision when we give him the space he needs.
On this note, to me it’s imperative that we give Brobbey more support in his isolated role as a hold-up striker.
I don’t need to tell anyone how good he is in that role but it is ultimately fruitless when we don’t have players playing off of him.
He’s often left alone in twenty or thirty yards of space while the team slowly pushes up into the opposition half, let alone get near to him. The wingers and Noah Sadiki and Enzo Le Fée should be buzzing in and around him to pick up on his layoffs and if Le Bris can manage that, we’ll start to reap more rewards from Brobbey’s good work.
Summary
Support Xhaka’s weaknesses and play to Brobbey’s strengths.
Gaps in midfield and isolated forward lines are causing us issues in attack and defence.
Counter-argument
Habib Diarra’s injury has played a big part in both aspects, for me.
He covers the ground quickly and effectively while getting close to Brobbey in an attacking sense when we go forward. His presence — whether it’s instead of Sadiki/Le Fée or in a different system altogether — could be a great solution if he can stay fit.
I’ll also concede that while Xhaka has been exposed, he’s also been a much less effective player generally this season — the causes of which we can’t truly know.
