How Trey Nyoni Is DISRUPTING Andoni Iraola's Midfield System | The Deep Dive

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Chris Pajak (0:40)

Hello everyone, welcome to The Deep Dive. I'm Chris Pajak, and I am joined today by absolutely nobody again, unfortunately. My fault this time, Josh is still away. I thought he would be back for this week. He is not back for this week. He will be back next week to join me for The Deep Dive as normal. He's away I'm going to. be away in Japan, having a whale of a time. We've had a few conversations. He absolutely loves it over there. So yeah, it's me today and I'm going to be looking a little bit, I wouldn't say back at Crystal Palace, but more at the midfield and the balance. Obviously, there's been lots of talk about the balance of the midfield over the last few weeks. And personally, I think it's probably to do with Anoni's excellent start to the season.

And then there's been rumblings about Subos line, his positioning and Gravenberg and his form and McAllister and his form and everything else. So, I just think it's a really interesting sort of topic. I'm going to do it slightly differently. Normally, we do a YouTube show, which is a clip from a wider Redmen Plus show. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to break up into two like we used to. So, this is going to be a full show in and of itself, but a shorter version. And then tomorrow, I'm going to do a Redmen Plus show. I've got lined up Simon Brundish for this one. I'm going to do a bit of a myth-busting sort of show around fitness and tactics and stats and everything else. And he's a strength and conditioning coach and absolutely superb. He also does the Anfield Index under pressure podcast, which is excellent as well. So, we're going to be asking him a few questions. I'm really excited for that show, but today it is the midfield balance. So, yeah, we're going to start off, I'll go back three games to begin with. So, I've got a graphic here, which is just a simple pass map from the Brighton game.

And you can see Liverpool are attacking left to right in this image as the home side. And we had a midfield three of McAllister, who's the number 10 We had Ryan Gravenberg, who's the number 38 And Florian Wirtz, who's the number seven. And just want to focus specifically on the midfield. Now, what's interesting with this is, Gravenberg's positioning looks like slightly ahead of McAllister, but this is the game where Wirtz goes off injured and Gravenberg goes into the 10 So he was probably a bit more to the right and a little bit deeper before he moved into the number 10 position.

And therefore you would have a sort of a two and a one, essentially, but Gravenberg is skewed by the fact that he moves into that sort of number 10 position. So as we move on, we're going to go into the game against Arsenal. And this time, if you just look at the three midfielders again, so Anoni is 42, Gravenberg is 10, Verz is seven. This is a very much a six and eight and a 10 And Anoni in the six, Gravenberg, sorry, McAllister in the eight and Florian Verz very much in the 10, but also in a front line with Alexander Isak, Bradley Barclay and Cody Gakpow on the right hand side. And that midfield three with Anoni dropping in between the center halves enabled us to play better right felt in the build up. But also it meant that there was an easy passing option. You can see that sort of thick line between Anoni and McAllister. Now, the thicker the line, the more often the passes were between those players. And Anoni does a really good job of hitting McAllister in that game. And then McAllister therefore moves on to either Bradley Barclay or Florian Wirtz as his two. So if we go back to the very first one again, you can see that the lines between the midfielders just aren't as thick. There's not as many passes between the midfielders. It's a bit more around the outside. When Florian Wirtz does get the ball though, he's able to hit Milos Kerkas and Cody Gacpo. And then we'll move on to the third one. And this is the game where we played at the weekend. It was Palace, it was McAllister, Subozlai and Wirtz. Now, we're attacking right to left on this one. I just want to draw your attention to Subozlai's positioning in this game. Completely different to the last one where you had a very clear, you know, a triangle between the three players. Now, McAllister is in his sort of normal position, but Subozlai is almost as high up the pitch as Florian Wirtz. And I think that is, if you could come back to me, I think that's where a lot of the conversations are around. Is Subozlai maybe technically disciplined enough to play in the midfield in the way that Andoni Iraola would like him to play? And I don't know the answers to that. I'm not presenting an opinion, I suppose, one way or another. I'm showcasing the last three Premier League games, the three different midfield make-ups and the average position. There's lots of things that can change these, as I've already mentioned. Grafenberg moves into the 10