I've said before - for me, a real manager is one who can come into a club and get the best out of the existing playing staff. Anyone can succeed given perfect conditions (i.e. their ideal hand-picked first XI). A good manager should have enough tactical understanding to choose a system based on his players, and be a good enough motivator to make those players play for him. One skill or the other isn't really enough. At this point Martin seems to have neither.
It's not even necessary to choose a system based on the players if you, as a manager, respect and request
four nonnegotiables - pace, running, moving and fighting. No matter what style of football you play if you don't have pace and if you are not running, moving and fighting, you won't be able to succeed. Everything else, like possession %, passing accuracy %, technique, skills, etc. is the icing on the cake. A slow, lazy, smart football will always be beaten by football played with more pace, running, moving and fighting.
And that's what is wrong with Martin's ball. We lack pace, and we don't run, move and fight enough. Martin obviously believes that by passing the ball slowly around you can outsmart and tire out your opponents. He obviously believes that it is possible to play 90 minutes of football without making mistakes. That's why in his post-match interview he moans about a couple of mistakes that (again) lost us the game. He is wrong. The mistakes didn't lose us the game. Even for the best teams in the world it's impossible to play 90 minutes of football without making any mistakes.
It's not about not making mistakes, it's about having a plan what to do when the inevitable mistakes happen. And this is where Martin has failed as Swansea manager. He doesn't have such plan.
First of all,
you should never play high defensive line with slow defenders and midfielders. You must have players who are at least as quick as the opposition attackers. Ideally quicker. Otherwise playing high defensive line is suicidal. Not only that you can't catch opposition attackers when they counter-attack, you can't even block crosses and shots because you are to slow to react and follow the move of your opponent. Ten conceded goals in six games prove my point. We simply gift high quality chances and easy goals to opposition by not being able to react quickly enough. So, if you want to play high defensive line then you have to put there the quickest players you have. In our case Obafemi, Sorinola and Manning as the back three. Or buy defenders who have pace.
And instead of buying defenders who have a lot of pace Martin has bought players who are good at passing the ball. The trouble is you can teach a player how to pass the ball but you can't teach him pace. Either you have it, or you don't.
And if you don't want to play Obafemi, Sorinola and Manning as the back three then don't play high defensive line.
Second,
Martin doesn't intervene when the players a) don't run and move enough, and b) don't pass the ball quickly enough. There is a reason why we didn't create many chances against Blackburn and Luton, and the reason is simply that our players didn't run enough and didn't move into the empty spaces when they could. Not only that Martin doesn't intervene when something like this happens, he allows this to happen game after game.
Third,
you can't always pass the ball from the back. A simple rule should be this: play from the back if you have enough space to do that, and if not, then hoof it. By playing the ball from the back when we are under pressure we give the opposition a clear psychological advantage - they are bullying us and at the same time forcing us to be scared of passing the ball from the back. Every psychologist will tell you when you are afraid of making mistakes you'll make them.
Fourth, Martin doesn't have a clue why we are impotent up front. In most cases
by playing possession football you force opposition to park the bus and you don't have much space to operate in and around opposition box. Martin is trying to solve this problem by instructing the players to pass the ball backwards in order to drag opposition attackers into our half and then find the empty pockets of spaces to penetrate opposition midfield and defence. But our opponents don't care, and they sit happily back in their own half waiting for our mistakes, which means we don't create much when we meet teams who park the bus. To create something against them you have to have tall players up front who are good in the air. Do we have such players in our squad? Only Fulton, Piroe and Ntcham have height to attack crosses. Others are more less useless unless we play Wood and Darling up front as strikers. The trouble is when we put crosses into opposition box the only players there to attack crooses are Obafemi & Sorinola on one side, and Obafemi & Manning on the other. Are they tall? No. Have any of them scored from a header yet? I can't remember. I remember that Piroe scored one goal from a header last season and that's it. And when we know that ALL the goals we have scored this season and most of the goals we scored last season are scored through the middle, so why on earth are we constantly trying to attack down the flanks when we almost never commit our tallest players up front to attack crosses?
Most teams counter possession based football by parking the bus and counter-attacking (that's what Blackburn did), but some of them press relentlessly all over the pitch and counter-attack. Luton for example. Martin doesn't have solution for high pressing teams either.
