The Welly Nix Need A Mentality Change, Not A Formation Change
First game of the season the Wellington Phoenix played like their backs were up against the wall and they pulled off a pretty impressive and massively encouraging 2-1 win over last season’s beaten finalists the Newcastle Jets. Then they went to Brisbane and they didn’t do a whole lot going forwards but they neutralised the Roar and returned to Wellington with a point away from home in a 0-0 draw. Then they got smoked 3-0 by Western Sydney, then they got smoked 2-0 away by Melbourne City, then on Saturday night they got smoked 3-1 by Adelaide.
Very quickly the early positivity evaporated into the Wellington breeze. The narrative became about this team’s excessively defensive shape, about their lack of chances created and therefore lack of goals scored. An own goal and a rebound from a missed penalty were the goals in the Jets game and then they went three games scoreless. Safe to say it was a valid concern.
But two weeks ago I wrote that we can’t overreact to a bad result or two, after all there’s a new manager in charge who is trying to drastically alter the way things are done at the Nix. Enacting plans which everybody loved when he was talking about them in preseason but now that they’re still losing games the same people can be quick to forget. They forget that this is a long-term process and that drastic change doesn’t happen straight away just because a manager talks about it. We are on a journey to overcome the bad habits of the past. All journeys have their ups and downs.
So how about three bad results? Because watching the game against Adelaide, it was bloody hard to defend, I tell ya (no pun intended). Starting with a starting lineup which saw several changes from the team that lost in Melbourne and not a whole lot that inspired confidence. Nathan Burns got his first start of the season, which was cool, but it meant that Sarpreet Singh was not only dropped from the starters but from the matchday squad entirely. And in case you thought he was injured, nope, he played for the reserves the following day. Hmm. Then also Louis Fenton was dropped for Ryan Lowry, Dylan Fox was out and Michal Kopczynski in, and Mitch Nichols returned to the bench for Alex Rufer. Fenton had been injured and missed a week of training so that’s why that happened (seriously, Lowry at wing-back… might as well have picked Callan Elliot… also guts to Rueben Way who is an actual wingback and didn’t get the nod).
I’ve tried to point out in recent weeks that the focus on the formation is misguided. You can play five at the back and be extremely attacking, the whole point of the formation is to have one pair of wingbacks rather than two fullbacks and two wide midfielders, so as to have an extra man in midfield/attack. The three CBs allow max coverage so that the wingbacks can be more advanced. There’s nothing wrong with the formation, it’s just how they’re playing it… and it’d make way more sense to tweak the strategy within that formation than to discard what they’ve been working on for months now to appease the portion of fans (and, let’s be honest, some members of the footy media fraternity) with the least patience out there.
When this team was named it looked like Rudan had caved into that pressure. With Kopa in for Fox, the names suggested a 4-3-3 and the Welly Nix team sheet confirmed that… which was the final clue that we were on the end of an elaborate/accidental troll. They Welly Nix teamsheets are NEVER presented in the right formation. I don’t know why, there’s not a coach in the world that waits until an hour before kickoff to set their gameplan and if it’s simply up to the media crew then surely they have a better idea of the team’s tendencies than that. Just copy-paste the formation from last week and change the names. Anyway, who cares, the point is that Kopa played in the middle of defence so never mind it was the same old shape after all.
See, this is a sign that Rudan is looking for solutions. He picked a midfielder at the back, something that coaches sometimes do with back threes where there’s cover for their defensive shortcomings which enables their better technical ability to be unleashed. Kopa didn’t sit strictly in the backline, he was free to step up in possession and rush up in defence… although that’s not a new tweak, Nix defenders have been gassing up out of the backline to close down attackers all season. Clearly a deliberate approach. What was fascinating was that Rudan said afterwards that Kopa’s positioning was based on where the opposition fullbacks were – when they sat deep, he stepped up into midfield. Love that kinda thing. Shows this team which are getting a reputation for stodgy defence are actually way more fluid than that.
And it looked alright as the Phoenix took the lead via a cleverly controlled volley from Mandi Sosa. His first goal for the club. It came after a set piece, no surprises there, and gotta say it was a valuable development as the midfield duo of Mandi and Rufer which has played a lot of this season together tends to work quite hard, tends to dish the ball around okay, but there’s not much creativity there. Having Mandi provide a goal is a welcome bonus, particularly if he can make this a semi-regular thing and bag four or five of them this season. Personally I think it was a mistake not having Nichols (or maybe Singh) instead of Rufer but then with Kopa in defence I get what he was going for.
It was still looking alright as we neared half-time… and then it all fell to tiny little pieces shattered on the marble floor. Thirty seconds short of stoppage time and it ain’t like the Nix had been flawless at the back but they were mostly good value for the 1-0 lead (cheers to Filip Kurto, who is proving a top notch keeper). But then Tom Doyle got in poor position from a cross and accidentally popped it into his own net. With both strikers in front of him he probably didn’t need to play at it at all. But he did and the Nix his the shed at 1-1.
That was the end of the game for the Wellington Phoenix. They then conceded straight after the break as Michal Kopczynski explored the risks in playing a midfielder at the back when he not only didn’t win the header from Michael Marrone’s cross but he didn’t even challenge and allowed Ken Ilso to get there ahead of Steven Taylor and score. From there on it was forty-three more minutes of the absolute worst of the 2018-19 Wellington Phoenix. And I mean the worst, it was awful. Eventually Ilso scored again and Adelaide flew back with a 3-1 victory.
Here’s what Mark Rudan had to say to open his press conference:
“Performance was okay, to be fair, the performance I thought was good. As good as it’s been all year if you look at the amount of ball we had and the chances we created. I thought we were very disciplined and organised, deserved to go 1-0 up as well, but the game was won and lost just before and just after half-time.”
The annoying thing with this Nix team is they so often look too slow to react, especially going forwards. When they’re clued in on defence they’re great but their inability to apply serious pressure the other way means they’re taking way too much pressure back upon themselves. At 0-0 or 1-0 they play quite well. They’re in the very least a functional A-League outfit. But as soon as they concede they just crumble and that’s not an exaggeration. They’re absolutely incapable of playing from behind. As soon as Adelaide took the lead this game was only ever going to go in one direction.
However… I also kinda get what Rudan’s saying about it being as good a performance as they’ve had all season. I didn’t at the time but now a day or two removed from the emotion of it I do. For one thing, they don’t have much competition for that tag yet, which helps the cause. But also I think for the most part they did what he wanted to see. The coach is always going to view the game a little differently because he’s the one who sets the gameplan. He knows what he’s looking for from his players, while we’re just judging things on what we see. We don’t really know what they’re working towards. And, honestly, when you consider the obvious individual error from Tom Doyle that allowed the equaliser (and at such a shocking time to concede) then you understand that claim a bit more. It wasn’t the tactics or the implementation of them that cost them the ascendency in this game (ascendency used in context – they were hardly dominating… but they were also in control as long as they had the lead). It was a preventable mistake that did it.
The abomination that followed needs a bit of context too. Rudan repeated at the presser what he’s been saying all along which is that the biggest thing to change is the mentality of the players. Sometimes that’s felt dismissive, like when he talks about Premiership players, but this is what he really means. It’s not the mistake, those happen. Rudes said that a couple times in his presser. It’s how you react to your mistakes that matters most and the Phoenix conceded right on the brink of half-time and reacted by conceding again straight after the second half kick-off. The ol’ one-two combo. Bouncer, Yorker. Right jab, left hook.
Mark Rudan: “They’re the moments that I look out for a lot because as soon as we go a goal down or as soon as we make a mistake, you know, they seem to go back to that default setting. Put my head down, almost feeling sorry for myself. It’s happened again. I don’t want it to happen again. It’s something that we’ve worked extremely hard on and we’re going to continue through the process.”
Maybe it’s all got more to do with mentality than with formation then. Because the Nix don’t look to hog possession and that’s fine. It’s especially fine in a league where most teams do prefer to engage in that possession arm-wrestle, the Nix are zigging while everyone else (except Perth) zags. That makes a lot of sense. But when they’ve gone behind and needed to score to get back into the contest they’ve been pitiful.
Is that because of their tactics though or because of their shell-shocked responses to conceding in the first place? Probably it’s a bit of both. Those negative reactions come from a familiarity with losing and from the knowledge that they don’t score a lot, so every goal they concede feels extra brutal as their isn’t that trust that they’ll simply score another one to make up for it. They’re not going to fix that until they score a few goals and get that belief back. But they can score goals playing this way, that’s not the issue.
What we’ve got to keep reminding ourselves is that the Phoenix playing crap in November does not mean the Phoenix will necessarily be playing crap in March.
Like the gaffer says, it’s a process, right?
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