- Cesc Fabregas looks like a mis-fit in Barca midfield.
It was all supposed to be really smooth. He was the one with the
Barca DNA, so getting into this midfield was not at all a big task for
Cesc Fabregas. The only factor to weigh in was how Iniesta and Xavi
would be rotated to accomodate Cesc in. And he didn't start badly at
all. Scored a number of goals and suddenly gave Barca a new dimension,
which no one though existed. But when the crunch time came towards the
end of the season, he simply stood as a misfit. Nobody knows what
happened. From then on, in Barca's midfield he always looked like
someone who is forced in the wrong place in a football field. the more
he play, the more it gets worse. To make matters worse for him, the ones
who cried for his signing has turned kind of against him and is
demanding a subsqeuent change in attitude and performance. For the
record, I have never been a huge fan of his signing. I did write about
it earlier in two post, you can read it here
Stop Fabregas Obsession and
Do we really need Cesc Fabregas?.
Everyone expected Cesc to take almost a year to integrate into the
side. What puzzles everyone is the fact with each minute playing in that
midfield he looks totally confused. So why this is happening. Let's
look into the reasons affecting Cesc at Barca.
To undestand what's going wrong
with Cesc Fabregas, one need to understand how a midfield works,
especially a Barca midfield. Even school kids know that at Barca the
midfield is the real force behind all the success. This midfield when
combined with someone like Messi(who drops back to be a part of
midfield) is the most dangerous in the history of football. That's why
when our midfield takes over, we look so good in attack and whe they
don't we look very vulnerable in defense. To understand more we need to
understand the traditional midfield positions. In a normal midfield you
have the Defensive Midfielder, Deep Lying Central Midfielder, Central
midfielder, Central Attacking Midfielder and the Attacking midfielder(I
am pusposefully ommitting the wingers here as that's not the way we
work). Now what all we have in our midfield? In Xavi we have a
traditional Central Midfielder, Busquets and Song is in the defensive
midfielder mould, whereas Iniesta is the traditional Central Attacking
midfiedler. You may ask why so much fuss about these? The area in a
footballing field occupied by these positions may differ by a couple of
yards, but the way they play differs completely. Fabregas is a simple
attacking midfielder who loves to play further up in the midfield. You
could see in the match against Valencia. Fabregas started in Iniesta's
role but was usually positioned further up the field. If you take the
average position stats of Messi and Fabregas for the night, you could
easily see that Fabregas remained further up than Messi for most of the
time.
With Fabregas trying to play Iniesta's or Xavi's role, and
subsequently drifting upwards we are ideally a one man short in midfield
at times. And against teams which presses well in midfield the team
looks vulnerable. So why can't Cesc play Iniesta's or Xavi's role? I
don't think it's ever going to happen. Simply by nature, cesc is a more
attacking focussed player than Xavi and Iniesta. That explains why he
was the best chance creator in all over Europe when he was at Arsenal.
But he is not a player in the mould of Iniesta or Xavi. Hence to expect
him to replace or occupy these two brilliant midfielders could be asking
too much. In order to utilize Cesc to his fullest, we may have to tweak
our formation a bit. He should ideally fit into a 4-3-1-2 formation or a
3-4-4 diamond in the middle formation. But both these systems will have
it's counter trade-offs. Putting Cesc in our midfield neautralizes his
effect as his defensive and ball retaining skill is no way near to
Iniesta or Xavi. Unless we tweak our system to bring Cesc in, we will
continue to see him producing not so great performances.
We Are Broken