FanPost

RDM, Ramires and 4-3-3



After watching yesterdays match I was pretty pissed with our coaching team for the team selection and the substitutions. I cannot fathom the reasons for selecting such a defensive team for a team like QPR. This has motivated me to write my first fanpost. I have been following chelsea for the past 3 years and WAGNH for the last year and this blog has really helped my understand the game better. So a big thanks to you guys.

Now to yesterdays game. First of all I do not understand why we had to play ramires and bertrand as offensive players. I can understand Oscar being new to the premier league but I think Moses should have been played from the start. We really lacked the cutting edge yesterday and slowly as QPR realized this, they pushed us more and more. In fact, the match ended with QPR having 53% possession over us.

I did some research and found this nice article at EPL Index: What to do with a problem like Ramires?

The writer argues that Ramires is much more suitable as CM than as Right Winger. The article offers some interesting stats which support this argument. Out of the 41 crosses attempted by him last season only 2 were successful and he recorded only 1 assist from open play. He has only 5% success rate for the crosses and 39% of his Open Play Passes were in the forward direction. What he has is the amazing pace, energy and a decent ground 50-50 success rate (57% compared to Lamps' 50%). Although it is not very clear if these stats are for the entire last season, it does make a case for him not starting every game as a RW. Against teams like barca, bayern and in emergency cases surely but not against lower premeir league teams who are most likely going to park the bus.

Secondly, why did we start with Lamps? I know he is a legend but he did play two matches for England in the space of 4-5 days. And it really showed. I checked some websites and they reported Lampard's pass completion rate to be around 65%. Looking into the Premier League games for Chelsea thus far, I can almost see a trend emerging.

Against Man City, we could not cope with the 3-4-1-2 although the red card really made things difficult for us. Against Wigan, Eden ran the show. However, against Reading we really struggled once they were leading and again Mata and Eden were too good for Reading. Had they better finishers we might have had difficulty converting this into a win. I really want to forget the match against Atletico and the last one was not much better either for our pivot.

I guess what I really mean to say is that Mikel - Lamps pivot is not going to win us the League (they started in all the above matches). And I really believe that we should fight for the top spot. I have read many times here that the formation should suit the players and not vice versa. Many football commentators I read on the internet believed that after the surprise fire sale of our midfield, we are going to revert to 4-3-3. We have the players to play it and we don't have them for 4-2-3-1. And lets not forget 4-3-3 is where Lamps thrives (used to at least) as well. And where one of the best players of last season (Ramires) can be best utilized.

Lastly, I would like RDM to be a little more offensive and flexible. I would have liked Oscar/ Moses or both to start in last game. Maybe Sturridge could have started in place of torres if the midfield was not set up for his style of play or had been subbed in earlier.

These are early days and after the damn break and last season's memories of the game I really wanted Chelsea to kick QPR's asses again. I just had to get this off my chest and I still believe in RDM. Please advice if I can do something to make my posts better. And once again, thanks to all you guys @ WAGNH.

This FanPost was contributed by a member of the community and was not subject to any sort of approval process. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions held by the editors of this site.

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