- 05/09/2023
West Ham United's Europa Conference League final win over Fiorentina was decided in a matter of seconds, but for manager David Moyes it owed everything to a decision he made an entire year ago.
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00:00 Hello there everybody, Adam Cleary from 442 here, but especially hello to fans of West
00:09 Ham United because you are now UEFA Europa Conference League champions!
00:15 Woo!
00:16 Irons, etc.
00:17 Now I could do a very long-winded, accurate introduction to this video where I set out
00:21 precisely all the points we're going to go through, but instead let's just look at this
00:25 video of David Moyes dancing.
00:27 That, my friends, is what it's all about.
00:34 Alright, so obviously that's not what it's all about at all.
00:39 It'll be a very, very short video, but it is, in my opinion, last night, all about David
00:44 Moyes.
00:45 Now we are going to go through the game last night and talk about both teams and precisely
00:47 what happened, but that won't take very long, will it, friends?
00:50 Because there wasn't really a whole lot of football in that game of football, was there?
00:55 It was kind of just vibes and also violence.
00:58 But just to set my stall out here on this video, okay, last night West Ham United won
01:03 the Conference League because of one decision David Moyes made almost a year ago that took
01:09 the entire season to pay off.
01:12 Like ultimately, who gives a s*** about any of this?
01:14 You've just won your first major trophy in decades.
01:18 Do tactics matter?
01:19 Do formations matter?
01:20 Do patterns of play matter?
01:23 Absolutely not.
01:24 Yes.
01:25 Everyone's saying what a lovely moment this is for David Moyes and how happy they are
01:28 for him, but no, I want him to get the credit he deserves for making this happen and to
01:34 do that, I have to do the nerd stuff.
01:37 So David Moyes, this is your life.
01:40 Right, so here are your two lineups last night.
01:42 Sorry, I don't have purples to beat you up, players.
01:44 You'll just have to use your imagination with the red ones.
01:46 West Ham United in the 4-2-3-1.
01:48 They have just about settled on this season and Fiorentina in the 4-3-3 that they are
01:53 very good at doing.
01:54 Now, not to toot my own cock too much or anything here, but I will be referencing a video I
01:58 did on West Ham just a few weeks ago because their constant changing of formation and system
02:02 to try and accommodate Lucas Paqueta has been their main source of problems in the Premier
02:07 League, but also really helped them out in the conference.
02:10 And I know everyone else calls him Lucas Paquetar, but in my soul, I am sure it must be Paqueta
02:16 and I'm fairly sure I've heard him say that as well.
02:18 So we're going to go with that.
02:19 Anyway, just to be blunt, I thought last night he had a dreadful game of football.
02:25 The entire way Fiorentina play rendered him almost completely redundant.
02:29 So just to wave the old magic wand here, this is what about 75% of the entire first half
02:35 looked like.
02:36 Fiorentina just penning West Ham back into their own half.
02:38 The way Vincenzo Italiano has got them set up means they can do a lot of different things
02:42 very, very well.
02:43 But just while I'm here, can you believe he's an Italian manager called Vincenzo Italiano?
02:48 Just to steal a joke verbatim from 442's Connor Pope, can you imagine if he was French and
02:52 just called Pierre Lefrance?
02:55 I'm a grown man.
02:56 Anyway, one of the things he really likes to do is Aaron Batt will drop from the midfield,
03:00 either between, behind or just in front of the two centre backs to allow the three of
03:04 them to get a little passing triangle going.
03:06 Now the vast majority of teams will only be able to press these three players with one
03:10 or two other players like West Ham last night.
03:12 They only had Antonio and Paqueta in that sort of area.
03:15 And what that will give you if you are three players being pressed by two is an overload.
03:19 It doesn't matter which one they go to, you're always going to have a man spare as they chase
03:23 the ball around and that allows them to get either Aaron Batt ideally or sometimes Milenkovic
03:27 because he can do it as well, the ball in space to hit a long diagonal to bypass the
03:32 midfield entirely and go into the wide areas.
03:36 We saw this a lot last night.
03:37 Pretty much every single time Aaron Batt got on the ball, he was hitting a long diagonal
03:41 into Gonzalez who would either go as wide as he possibly could to try and get a bit
03:45 of space so he could win the ball and take on Emerson or he would go and sit on him and
03:49 try and win knockdown instead.
03:51 This is something Fiorentina do all the time and David Moyes even spoke in the build up
03:54 of having a real selection headache over his full backs because he wanted to still have
03:58 an attacking impetus but he did want a guard against this.
04:01 Regardless though it was a good selection because Emerson had quite a good game in this
04:04 role.
04:05 He didn't give Gonzalez too much free reign in that position but it is noticeable that
04:09 the two times that Gonzalez did receive the ball well in that area, the first time it's
04:14 what led to the equaliser and the second time just a few minutes later Fiorentina should
04:19 have scored from.
04:20 Now here's the thing, I'm not going to focus too much on the first two goals.
04:22 The West Ham one was just a bit of play from a thrower in which whisper it, they shouldn't
04:26 actually have got that was Fiorentina's ball and the second one as we discussed came from
04:30 Fiorentina's game plan that they had pretty much from the first whistle.
04:33 But my original point is that David Moyes did a thing a year ago and he had complete
04:38 faith in it despite everything else that was going on around him.
04:40 Now in the grand scheme of the season he had faith in it despite the fact the results weren't
04:44 there and they were falling down the table and people were calling for his job but in
04:48 the context of last night he had faith in it despite how little of the ball and how
04:53 little of the chances West Ham had.
04:55 West Ham had legitimately a horrible, horrible first half.
04:58 They could barely get out of their own half.
05:00 They had something like 26 or 27% of the ball.
05:04 In a cup final when you're not like a massive underdog that's astronomically small and reason
05:09 for that is because they simply had no build up.
05:11 They had no way of getting going.
05:12 They could not get out.
05:13 When they did manage to recover the ball in their own defensive third they could not play
05:17 through Fiorentina.
05:18 They could not get out wide.
05:19 So their only option was to bypass their own midfield entirely and try and hit Miquel Antonio
05:24 which they did do but Antonio just could not make the ball stick in this area.
05:29 There was an example about halfway through the first half West Ham recover the ball here
05:33 they go straight into Antonio but he is pounced upon by the Fiorentina team.
05:37 He loses the ball and Fiorentina nearly then create a really good chance in the transition.
05:42 But at the very beating heart of everything that was not going right for West Ham was
05:47 this man Lucas Paqueta.
05:49 Sometimes he would drop a little deeper to try and help defend but there wasn't really
05:51 a player in this area for him to pick up so he was kind of just wandering aimlessly.
05:55 Sometimes he was just going alongside Antonio and giving West Ham like a flat 4-4-2 out
06:00 of possession but he doesn't press the same way Antonio does.
06:03 So he was kind of just laxadaisily chasing the ball around getting passed around and
06:07 when West Ham did get the ball back that first ball out of defence wasn't to him it was to
06:11 Antonio who wasn't holding up the ball so he couldn't even get him involved.
06:14 Wherever he went whatever he did in that first half there was no viable use for him.
06:19 He received the ball less than any other West Ham player.
06:23 But again David Moyes had faith in what he was trying to do.
06:26 He had a very specific reason for having Lucas Paqueta on the pitch and just because it didn't
06:30 happen in the first half just because it didn't happen in most of the second half didn't mean
06:34 he was going to lose faith in it.
06:35 Because you see for all West Ham couldn't get the ball, they couldn't get going, they
06:38 couldn't get any build up, they couldn't get the ball to the man who's supposed to be their
06:42 most important player, they were actually pretty okay in that first half.
06:45 Like for all Fiorentina's dominance each side only had one shot on target in that first
06:50 half like here's Fiorentina's and here's West Ham's.
06:53 Yeah probably not going to leave that in the edit.
06:56 Shouldn't joke about it should you it wasn't funny.
06:57 If you're watching UEFA 442 strongly condemns.
07:01 Also I saw who did it, it was this man.
07:02 So second half things get a little bit more stretched, they get a little bit more chaotic,
07:06 West Ham are finally able to play a little bit, they get into space that previously they
07:09 could only dream of, they get their penalty, they go 1-0 up.
07:13 Fiorentina equalise by doing the exact same thing they were trying to do in the first
07:16 half it's just that now that West Ham are playing out a little bit more they're a little
07:20 bit more open that enabled them to finally get through that way.
07:23 The game is going pretty much exactly as you would expect to and we are heading for extra
07:29 time.
07:30 And yet despite the game opening up, despite West Ham finally getting on the ball a bit
07:33 more Lucas Paqueta is still completely ineffective.
07:37 He completes 16 passes across the entire game.
07:41 But David Moyes keeps him on the pitch because he did not bring him to West Ham United to
07:46 make 100 passes in a game, he brought him here to make one.
07:51 And this time last year David Moyes took a long hard look at his West Ham team, saw them
07:55 as functional, as battling, as really well organised and thought the one thing that's
08:00 going to take us from here to the next level is additional quality.
08:04 Not solid pros, not workhorses, not reliable players who will never let you down, one or
08:09 two players dotted throughout the squad that when games get to this stage, when structures
08:14 break down, when space opens up, when nobody's quite sure what they're supposed to be doing,
08:18 they can rely on their individual ability to make a massive difference.
08:23 And in the 89th minute Fiorentina take a goal kick that goes into the mixer, it bobbles
08:28 around, the ball is loose and Lucas Paqueta dives on that ball, not to retain possession,
08:34 not to win it back, but because he knows something can happen.
08:38 He looks up for just a fraction of a second and one touch of the ball later, Jared Bowen
08:43 is cleaned through behind the Fiorentina defence to win the Conference League for West Ham.
08:48 There are a number of players in West Ham's squad who would have had a much more effective
08:53 game in that final last night, but there are none in that squad, indeed few in Europe,
08:58 who would have instinctively done what he did in the last minute.
09:02 Just look at this still for a second, it is bouncing, it is loose, it is congested, they
09:05 are outnumbered in that area.
09:08 And crucially neither Bowen nor Antonio are on the shoulder of the last defender, they're
09:11 not already making the run, there isn't the imperative there to get on the ball and make
09:15 the pass.
09:16 But a player of that quality just knows their defence is high, we have pace, if I can get
09:21 on that ball, I can kill them.
09:24 And that is exactly what adding quality to your squad is all about.
09:28 They might do bonkers for 89 minutes prior to that, but if you can find a way to make
09:32 that okay, to do the work around them, then they can do the things in these moments that
09:38 other players can't.
09:39 West Ham had an absolutely crap Premier League season, because David Moyes just got rid of
09:43 all the fundamentals and the things they knew they did well in favour of experimenting with
09:47 systems and shapes and ideas that would get the most out of these quality players.
09:52 And when it wasn't working and people were calling for him to be sacked, he didn't deviate
09:56 from it, he kept his faith in what he was doing because he wasn't concerned about his
10:00 short-term future as a manager, he was thinking about the long-term future of this as a team.
10:05 Like it might well have cost him his job, but he knew it would be leaving the squad
10:09 in a better place for having done it.
10:11 And there is simply nothing that sums up the West Ham United journey this season better
10:15 than 'your best player is your worst performer, but stick with him and he will win you this
10:21 game'.
10:22 Actually no, what am I saying, that's not the thing that sums up West Ham's season,
10:25 it's the fact that Danny Dyer simultaneously got to experience the greatest moment in his
10:30 life while listening to thousands of other men sing about the goal scorer shagging his
10:35 daughter.
10:36 Funny old game.
10:37 Anyway, yes, that's it West Ham United fans, once again, genuine, massive congratulations.
10:41 I don't know why you're watching a tactics video the day after you've just won a major
10:44 tournament but I'm glad you are.
10:46 You can get me on Twitter @adamcleary, C-L-E-R-Y, and get the entire 442 social spectrum @442.
10:52 In the meantime though, if you are so inclined, the brand new issue of 442 is available now
10:55 from all good retailers and the crap ones as well and it's really, really good, even
10:59 if I do say so myself, which you do!
11:02 Goodbye!
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