Our fullbacks - The weakest link in our team

The most revealing stat from this campaign is that our fullbacks attempted 50 passes into the attacking third, they succeeded with just 16 of them. When you have fullbacks who when making a positive pass have a 68% chance of giving away possession, well you can forget about looking at anywhere else but there because you'll lose to any half decent team with those fullbacks.

I hear a lot of people mentioning McClean, Long, Walters etc as solutions to our problem which is a real head scratcher since they'd do well to even see the ball given the current distribution rate of our deep 6 players.
The blueprint to defeat us right now is as simple as pressuring our defensive players high up the pitch. They're too slow and cumbersome to play out from the back and too weak at passing to at least just break even with it.
People don't like how we're set up in the attacking third but thats akin to trying to attach a roof to something with no walls or foundation. So how do we address the real and most significant problem in our team - the distribution from deep. Without looking at that our attacking players will have no platform to do anything. We might as well have had Ronaldo, Messi, Gomez and Villa up front this Euros because the results would have been the same.

We need more talented footballers, yes but we need them in deep positions to play out of defence. The only alternative is the long ball game.

The fullbacks are not without blame but in order to make a pass there has to be someone there to pass it to. The game is easy if there is always an easy pass available. We always tend to be on the back foot aswell which makes it even harder, we should be pressuring there back line and making them make mistakes.

I don't think O'Shea should be considered a definite starter at CB or FB, he has rarely performed that well for Ireland. Ward should start playing pitch and putt instead.

Fair point, but do we need a thread on this? There's plenty of debate elsewhere about the team and its future and discussion of full backs and their inadequacies is quite prominent at times.

I don't see long ball as being the solution to giving the ball away.

I've often thought that if you don't have good full backs why play any, but Ireland playing 3 at the back would be fanciful.

One thing that struck me at White Hart Lane was how confident Rovers' back 4 were playing the ball among themselves and to the midfield 2. Crafty and I were reveling in the novelty value and the difference to the national team. Only vastly superior opposition prevented it from becoming a platform to anything more meaningful. You need a CM confident receiving the ball (Gibson best option for Ireland, I think it was O'Donnell for Rovers) for a start and then it's all about people showing and making good runs. Roy Keane always wanted the ball, Xavi always^2.

The full backs and CBs are the foundation alright but the "value added" comes from further up the pitch. Our full backs give the ball away either because they're under pressure or because they have no options. My pet hate in football is "speculative" passing.

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Originally Posted by the bear

The fullbacks are not without blame but in order to make a pass there has to be someone there to pass it to. The game is easy if there is always an easy pass available. We always tend to be on the back foot aswell which makes it even harder, we should be pressuring there back line and making them make mistakes.

I don't think O'Shea should be considered a definite starter at CB or FB, he has rarely performed that well for Ireland. Ward should start playing pitch and putt instead.

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There's an element of that as well, the link between our defensive distribution to our midfield is the place more than anywhere else where everything is breaking down. It's difficult to say who exactly is to blame but a mixture of poor receiving positions, poor decision making and just general poor passing from the fullbacks are the reasons.

It's difficult to say because I don't know what the gameplan is. Are the centre mids told to not roam into receiving positions? If they were expected to do that I can't imagine Whelan and Andrews would still be starters after 4 years because they're really bad at it, so I'd imagine they're told to keep their shape while the FBs are instructed to link with either the wide players or hoofball to Doyle.