http://www.eveningexpress.co.uk/Article.aspx/1397139

 

ABERDEEN FC boss Mark McGhee was man enough to admit he got his tactics wrong in their 0-0 SPL draw at Falkirk.

But he is convinced a 4-3-3 formation is the best if he is to bring success to Aberdeen FC.

McGhee also revealed youngster Fraser Fyvie will have a key role to play once his squad have adapted to his methods.

Q Do you have the players at the club now who can make the 4-3-3 system work?

A It’s looking more and more like we don’t.

We have the right sort of play-maker for it in young Fraser Fyvie.

He is a highly promising midfielder who is capable of making the range of passes needed to make the system a success.

But the problem at Falkirk was that most of the time the ball went away over his head up to the front players.

People didn’t give Fraser the ball often enough, so the amount of times he got to actually pass it were very limited.

All we saw was passes being lumped back to front.

Fraser and the other midfielders need to be given the ball a lot more if the 4-3-3 formation is going to be of use.

But we clearly don’t have enough natural passers of the ball in that midfield area at the moment either.

Gary McDonald likes to run at defences with the ball and Mark Kerr is a battler and does other  things he is very good at.

But we are going to have to come up with more passers to make that system really work.

Until we have them, we may have to return to a more orthodox shape.

Q Do you now regret going with the 4-3-3 tactics in the clash with the Bairns?

A No, not in the slightest. I feel very strongly that, as a new manager in only my fourth league game, I’m quite entitled to be playing about with the systems we use.

It’s my job to experiment and try different players and different systems to see what is going to be the best for the club.

If something works then fine, I will stick with it.

But if it doesn’t, then it will be back to the drawing board until we find a way of playing that gets the very best out of the players we have at the moment.

I’m not going to apologise for that.

We played 4-3-3 at Falkirk because we had worked hard on it in training and I was sure the players were ready to take that into a game.

The main object was to try to get players down the sides of the Falkirk team and get our forwards spinning in behind their back four.

It didn’t work because we tried to do it off balls straight from the back.

We missed out a whole phase of play, the midfield, so there was little chance of the 4-3-3 being effective.

The system also worked better when I was at Motherwell because when we lost the ball we defended with 10 players.

When we were on the back foot at Falkirk we defended with only eight.

The front three became too detached, which was not the way we worked on things, or spoke about, in training.

It meant we were left very exposed in wide areas – particularly in the first half. The three forwards were so far up front Falkirk found it to easy to cause us problems with diagonal balls.

How many times do I have to repeat myself.

Aberdeen are and always will be a 4-4-2 team, the players are too thick to adapt to anything else.

 

:clap:

 

Finally! Someone speaks sense!

 

If it's good enough for Man Utd, the Gothenburg Greats and even (spit) the 1966 England World Cup team, then why is 4-4-2 not good enough for us? Why was JC and now MM so hell-bent on getting us to play a system that our players just don't like playing?

 

These players have been brought up playing 4-4-2. It's a British institution, is a proven successful formation and ... more to the point ... it's the ONLY formation our players are actually comfortable playing in. Aberdeen don't win games playing 3-5-2, 4-3-3, 4-5-1, 3-1-4-1-1, 1-1-9 or whatever systems we've seen over the past few years.

 

Stick to what these players know, and they'll maybe produce the goods!