Much has been made about Ipswich boss Kieran McKenna’s comments regarding West Ham’s brand of long-ball, direct football.
The Tractor Boys’ boss remarked after Saturdays game, “I think we conceded poor goals at poor times. It’s the first team in the league that we’ve faced with that style, really. They played a lot of direct balls to Antonio and Soucek. We didn’t deal with those well enough, and we made some poor mistakes for the goals that made the game difficult.”
McKenna is welcome to his opinions, and I certainly don’t take offence to them. I just think he made his point after the wrong game. Certainly, there have been fixtures where Julen Lopetegui’s tactics appear to involve passing it around in central defence before hoofing it long to a big fella.
The first game of the season against Aston Villa was a good case in point, with Tomas Soucek deployed higher up the pitch than Michail Antonio. However, in Saturday’s fixture, there was far more structured and patient build-up in the Hammers’ attacking play, and the results showed.
Sure, there were some crosses, with Emerson helping to set up a goal, and when Kudus hit the post with a header from Antonio’s perfect cross. But there was far more interchange of passes on show than artillery; most of the threat posed by West Ham was when the ball was on the ground.
I’m sure once he watches the game back, McKenna will reflect that his post-match comments were not entirely reflective of West Ham’s passing game. I’m not saying we played quite like Barcelona, but McKenna would have many believe the Hammers were the result of a Tony Pulis & Sam Allardyce coaching seminar.
Standard passive aggressive response from a manager upset that his side got tonked 4-1.
Nice to see Kalvin Phillips finally come good for us as well.
We did play a lot of direct balls out of defence to Antonio or Souchek and they did a good job of holding the ball up and passing back to a team mate. We also played a lot of slow passing build up from the back football and a fair bit of tici taci around the box. We have more than one way of playing. The direct ball from Kilman out to Souchek though was particularly effective at getting us up the pitch quickly against Ipswich though I thought.
Does it matter what tactics we play? If we play, as part of our overall tactics, long balls, then, as manager, he should have trained his team to counter it.
Losing coach/manager steak.
“Poor goals at poor times”. Poor goals for who? When’s a good time to concede a goal?
Just easy stuff to say to a reporter that probably isn’t too clued up.
Steak? I’m sure I meant speak.
I’m just not down with this autocorrect lark⚒️