Livi Recap ft. G Stew and Team Shape

From The Dung Heap

An analytical look at The Dons & our opponents

Livingston - Pittodrie

SPFL Premiership - 16/3/2019


So not only did I have to sit in the freezing cold for two hours, I now have to write about it. Thanks Aberdeen!

First of all, their goal. Devlin leaves his man to go and challenge Lewis Ferguson for the header which allows them time to control it and get the cross/shot in. Couldn't really expect Ball or McLennan to cut it out. Even if they got there it was ending up in the net. Really poor defending but I didn't need to rewatch it to realise that.

How on earth can Cosgrove be so deep here yet we've still got that huge expanse in the middle of the pitch that we just seem to forget about? Ball and McLennan linked up well again which is a plus point but McLennan has been dragged into that middle mush once again, so much so that he and McGinn on the opposite wing managed 7 passes between each other. It's not a whole heap but when McLennan and Ball was our best pairing with 18 it's closer to that than it should be. For comparison's sake, Forrest and Sinclair, and Kent and Candeias had 1 pass between the wingers in each game.

I just don't get what we're trying to achieve by pushing everything into the hole (ooh er!). May, too deep, Cosgrove, too deep, McLennan, too narrow, McGinn, a wee bit narrow. 3 players all occupying the same space and only McGinn appears to be the out ball. Could this be the reason Stewart isn't cutting it in red?


*drumroll*



Of course it is!

A lovely balanced team. You can see the formations and there's a definite role for each player in the team. You know exactly where Stewart is going to be when you're playing like that. You know where to run and he knows where the space will be.

Compare and contrast to what we have had recently...

What the hell is that?! We're really sad that McLean and Christie have left us so we'll get 3 players to do their job in each game? Sake! Is it any wonder we aren't producing anything? We've come a real way from where we used to be. Games against the 2 cheeks were almost foregone conclusions. Now that we've turned the tide there we've slipped up and ignored what we need to be doing to win the "little" games. Problem is, when you aren't winning the "little" games, they become huge.

I've compared the numbers from Stewart's first spell here, his time at Killie and at us this season. There's not a lot of outliers. But the one main one is at Killie, he was getting 2.81 shot assists on average per game. In this spell he's only managing 1.59. So the problem isn't behind him, it's what's happening ahead of him. With the wingers drifting in it's no surprise the main forward isn't finding the same space. Now this will probably evolve into a post in itself later on but we'll get to that when we get to it. I'll keep you all posted!

For our goal? McGinn plays a great switch on the counter to McLennan (yeah, I'm advocating them passing to each other now) and he runs down the wing, like an actual winger, and his cross leads to us scoring a goal. Imagine we based all of our play on that...