Thread by @ThreadmanChaza

MANCHESTER UNITED’S Out of Possession Approach vs Brighton- A THREAD🧵

Yesterday Manchester United booked their place in the FA Cup final thanks to a victory (on penalties) against Roberto de Zerbi’s Brighton team. During the game, I noticed a few tactical things that I want to talk about further:

-Hybrid Pressing
-4-1-4-1 shape
- Aggressive CBs

This season, we have seen Manchester United adopt a “hybrid pressing” system.

What does hybrid pressing actually mean?

Hybrid Pressing is a system that combines both man marking and zonal tendencies. This season we have often seen Rashford and Antony with hybird pressing roles.

This means they have the roles of pressing both CB and FB, they are not assigned to man mark one player. Therefore, our wingers’ positioning, movement and awareness is very important. For example, if our wingers jump onto the opponent’s centre-backs too early, this

could leave the opposition’s full backs open in lots of space. Our press is then very inefficient and our full backs are in 2 vs 1 situations.

This is depicted in the image below.

Let's take a look at United's hybrid pressing. Martial is pressing the ball sided CB (Dunk) with a line of 4 behind, including Eriksen very tight to Caicedo. As Martial is pressing the ball sided CB, Antony is cutting off the passing lane to Brighton’s LB. You can see Marcus

Rashford positioned halfway in between CB and RB so we can see elements of hybrid pressing here. Let’s fast forward a few seconds.

Within 4 seconds, you can spot problems.

Bruno is now very tight to MacAllister and Eriksen is still in a good position man marking Caicedo. But the issue now is that Rashford has gone to engage Webster, and the GK has an open passing lane to Pascal Groß. And because United’s midfield 2 of Eriksen and Bruno have man

marking jobs, they cannot leave their man to get out to Groß (RB). Our FBs also do not like to push up in these situations, as they stay tight to the opposition’s wingers (I imagine this is so our CBs do not get isolated in the channels).

So the pass to the full back is open.

In this next example we see Dunk in possession for Brighton. By the way Rashford is positioned, you can see his body weight moving forward, so he is in motion, moving closer to Webster. Pascal Groß is in space towards the bottom of your picture.

If we move forward 3 seconds, look at the situation Brighton created. Rashford is close to Webster, but now the pass out to Groß is on. We also saw Enciso and Welbeck drop between the lines at times to offer passing options and drag our defenders out to create space.

However, United generally managed both players excellently well due to how aggressive Shaw and Lindelöf were and prevented Brighton creating too many clear cut chances from progressing the ball through the 3rds. For instance, look how high Shaw goes to track Welbeck's run.

The out ball to Groß was on so many times in the first half. Because of the way United press and the fact that our FBs do not jump up the pitch to close down the opposition’s FBs, it means Antony and Rashford have to either get their positioning perfectly accurate and/or sprint

back to try to stop the opposition’s FB causing overloads in our half. And there is an example of Rashford doing that here. He sprints back and wins a free kick after being fouled- this season, Rashford has not grasped the positioning element too well yet, often not curving his

runs well enough- so he has to sprint back, but there were many occasions in this game where he did not sprint and Dalot was left 2 vs 1, and still did a good job. Ten Hag will certainly be unhappy with United's team defending down this left hand side at times during the game.

Let’s take a look at Antony now on our right hand side. Generally this season, Antony has dealt with the hybrid pressing role really well. His positioning is good, but also his desire and intensity to get back and chase the opponent’s FB has been brilliant this season.

Webster finds Dunk with a pass. You can see Antony here is in a good position. Brighton’s LB is out of picture. We can also see Martial pressing the ball side CB, Eriksen on Caicedo and Bruno on MacAllister- very common themes keep repeating here. How does this situation develop?

Well, even though the ball finds Estupiñán, Antony sprints (as we talked about earlier, our wingers have to do this) and we force Brighton back. United’s wingers have to work so hard against very technically strong teams who have the players that can play these passes out to FBs.

All season, Antony has done this well. Even though his positioning is normally good in these situations, no matter how good it is, good teams will always be able to exploit the pass out to the FB- but Antony’s excellent work rate means that the threat is reduced down that side.

So, overall, how did United cope with Brighton’s unfamiliar 4-2-4 build-up shape? The answer is, reasonably well. The use of a 4-1-4-1 shape off the ball, Dalot and Wan-Bissaka having good games 1 vs 1 and Lindelöf and Shaw being absolutely dominant up against Enciso and Welbeck

when they dropped in between the lines. Despite Brighton exploiting our left-hand side through Eriksen’s lack of mobility and Rashford’s struggles when pressing, we limited Brighton to an xG of 1.22 during 90 mins, which is low compared to their season average of 1.83 (FBref).

Erik ten Hag deserves big praise for how he set his team up yesterday. Without his best CB pairing, he managed to find a way to nullify, as best as possible, Brighton's build-up play, a team Pep Guardiola called "The best in the world" at playing out from the back.

Manchester United still have weaknesses in their out of possession game, with our pressing and lack of mobility in midfield causing us issues at times, but we are still in a brilliant position this season and a lot of that is down to our manager and his tactical tweaks.

Thank you for reading this thread- I hope you enjoyed! please do follow me for more threads like these. I will be covering this analysis on my YouTube channel so please do subscribe to my channel!

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