How Salah and Foden wreaked havoc in the half-spaces
Tom Worville Oct 4, 2021
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Liverpool’s 2-2 draw against
Manchester City on Sunday evening saw world-class individual performances from
Mohamed Salah and
Phil Foden.
Their decisive involvements — a goal and an assist for Salah and a goal for Foden, whose pass eventually made its way to
Kevin De Bruyne for the equaliser but wasn’t officially given as an assist — made a mockery of their respective opponents’ defences.
In fact, all four of the goals in the game were as a result of some poor defending in the channels — the space between the edge of the six-yard box and the 18-yard box, often referred to as the half-spaces.
The game itself was a story of two clear halves, with City dominating in the first and Liverpool dominating in the second, as the xG race chart below demonstrates clearly.
That picture of the game matched Jugen Klopp’s own assessment of the match. “Thank God a football game has two halves,” the Liverpool manager told Sky Sports after the match. “We are really happy about the second half and not so happy about the first half, for obvious reasons. We did a lot of things wrong in the first half. City did a lot of things right. I was most happy in my career about the half-time whistle because it’s just tricky to get into contact with the players to change things. It was obviously never planned that we play like this. We needed half-time, and we used half-time, and we played a really good second half.”
A sign of how City would look to attack Liverpool came in the first half. Bernardo Silva, following a mazy run in which he beat several Liverpool players and left Virgil van Dijk on his knees, fed a through-ball to Foden, whose pace and intelligent movement caused problems all afternoon for Liverpool’s makeshift right-back
James Milner.
Foden received the pass slightly wider than he would have liked, but Milner was unable to recover in time to put any discernible pressure on the City player. Thankfully for Liverpool,
Alisson was on hand to tighten the angle further and save Foden’s shot.
In the second half Liverpool dominated proceedings on the xG front, with their go-ahead goal from
Sadio Mane again as a result of a battle between a winger and full-back, in which the latter lost.
With Salah on the ball by the touchline,
Joao Cancelo was aggressive, jumping forward in an attempt to win the ball back.
Salah easily chipped the ball over Cancelo’s outstretched leg, blasting past the Portuguese and quickly into a counter situation. With the Egyptian starting to dribble infield, the shared movements by Mane and Diogo Jota made for interesting viewing.
Jota arched his run inwards, looking to expose the space behind
Kyle Walker, Mane cut more incisively in the gap between
Ruben Dias and
Aymeric Laporte, who not for the first time in the game, he managed to turn. Consider Laporte’s body position in the frame below, effective if he can force Salah out wide….
…but Salah cuts inside, spinning Laporte around, leaving a huge gap between him and his centre-back partner Dias. Mane has cut across Jota at the time of the pass, with the Senegal forward finishing emphatically past
Ederson.
Despite Klopp’s comments that his side tightened up after the break, City were still able to hit back 10 minutes later, again looking to expose the makeshift right-back Milner.
Gabriel Jesus passes to Foden, who is lurking in the left half-space. Milner is slow on the turn and unable to close the angle down, arguably not deep enough in the first place given the positioning of
Joel Matip next to him covering the spare City attacker.
The finish from Foden is, to put it bluntly, fantastic. He hits it low and hard with his laces, with Milner nor Alisson able to get close to it. Nevertheless, a quicker defender may have been able to block Foden’s effort, or apply pressure to him, which Milner was unable to do.
At 35, Milner’s appearance numbers are staggering, a testament to a consummate professional who has kept himself in top shape into his mid-thirties. Against some of the best attackers in the world though, his lack of pace both over short distances and on the turn was exposed.
Seven minutes later, Salah hits back again. The goal is completely different to Liverpool’s first, far more reliant on the Egyptian’s close control and balance to work the resulting chance. The factors for how it came about in the first place though are practically identical.
With Salah receiving a pass from
Curtis Jones, Cancelo again jumps up to pressure him. Without the space to blast into this time, Salah uses his strength to roll the Portuguese.
Bernardo slots into the space vacated by Cancelo, aiming to block off any route into
Jordan Henderson, who’s lurking on the shoulder of the defensive line.
Henderson’s positioning is important here, as although he’s not directly active in the play, he occupies Laporte in this instance too, who senses the danger and comes over to cover too.
But as Salah turns, he easily gets past Bernardo and again is facing up Laporte in a one-versus-one situation.
Again, note the body positioning of Laporte and Dias. Dias (No 3) is square on, able to both cut out balls that are played in front of him — perhaps to Firmino (No 9) who is well-placed between him and Laporte (No 14) — or to drop back and engage Salah himself should he need to.
Laporte, on the other hand, is too open to the touchline, giving Salah an easy route behind him, and leaving him completely off-balance when Salah cuts back in again to head directly towards goal and fire past Ederson.
The final goal of the game was once again born in the half-space. Milner — on a yellow card and perhaps lucky to not be sent off for scything down Bernardo in the second half — was substituted, with Klopp bringing on Joe Gomez to try and shore things up on the right-hand side.
Gomez is certainly blessed with far more pace than Milner, but his issue has never been about his speed, it’s been about his
lack of brakes.
When the ball leaves the feet of a relatively unpressured Kevin De Bruyne in midfield, Gomez slows his run back towards his own goal, perhaps due to him not seeing Foden over his shoulder and perhaps in an attempt to catch
Raheem Sterling offside.
Gomez is able to recover using his speed but is a bit too slow to apply the brakes…
…which gave Foden ample space between Liverpool’s lines to cut the ball back, with it falling fairly fortuitously to De Bruyne to smash home.
Liverpool’s defensive issues in wide areas were down to both having too little pace, but also too much of it.
For Manchester City, it was excess aggression and Laporte’s poor body shape at times that allowed Liverpool to wreak havoc down the right.
Salah and Foden were the stars of the show, but they were certainly helped by a handful of small but highly impactful errors.
