match thread (image) Rangers 0 - 1 Kilmarnock

[compo 7,216]

First touch the secret of making full use of the ball to many players like to dawdle and fanny about , watch some of these lads at man city or Liverpool its an education .

[Gaffer 1,665]

3 hours ago, Uilleam said:

It would help if the players could pass the ball to another Rangers' player with some degree of consistency. 

When there's an issue with failed passes, it's almost always down to a lack of movement.  Barcelona are often held up as an amazing passing side, but even I could make almost all of those passes stick because the movement around the player with the ball means there's always an easy pass on.  That's why Rousseau was talking about the movement in himself previous post.  A team's success at passing is directly related to its movement.  It's why one of the measures being used by Sky Sports (and others) is the distance travelled by each player.  It is a blunt instrument, however it is a good indicator.  You can see a big difference between poorly performing teams and hig performing teams.  The average is around 8.5km per game but some players like Messi have an average of 11-12km, which is a bit surprising when you consider that Messi looks quite lazy at points in games.  As I say, it's a blunt measure and there are many better ways to assess the movement, but interesting to look out for nonetheless.

[Uilleam 5,960]

29 minutes ago, Gaffer said:

When there's an issue with failed passes, it's almost always down to a lack of movement.  Barcelona are often held up as an amazing passing side, but even I could make almost all of those passes stick because the movement around the player with the ball means there's always an easy pass on.  That's why Rousseau was talking about the movement in himself previous post.  A team's success at passing is directly related to its movement.  It's why one of the measures being used by Sky Sports (and others) is the distance travelled by each player.  It is a blunt instrument, however it is a good indicator.  You can see a big difference between poorly performing teams and hig performing teams.  The average is around 8.5km per game but some players like Messi have an average of 11-12km, which is a bit surprising when you consider that Messi looks quite lazy at points in games.  As I say, it's a blunt measure and there are many better ways to assess the movement, but interesting to look out for nonetheless.

i have always held that it's a simple game, really, and involves, at base, an ability to trap, pass, and move. 

In the game versus Kilmarnock, for example, the players often seemed shorn of these fundamental accomplishments, their most obvious shortcoming being an inability to find, regularly, a colleague with the ball, the failures comprising of poor control, or poor passing,or  the failure of the intended recipient to do other than wait for the ball to come to him, or a permutation of any two, or all three, of these, in one, failed, move. 

 

 

 

Edited March 20, 2018 by Uilleam

[colinstein 294]

the Killie game reminded me of Warburton's game plan.....looked like many matches I'd seen when he was boss

[pete 2,499]

in everyone's biopsy of how Rangers played they seem to forget that there were 2 teams on the park and Kilmarnock played better than we did.

[Gaffer 1,665]

41 minutes ago, pete said:

in everyone's biopsy of how Rangers played they seem to forget that there were 2 teams on the park and Kilmarnock played better than we did.

That's not what I witnessed Pete, although it does depend on what you mean by played better.  Killie were never in the game.  They closed us down occasionally in our own half, but tended to retreat every player behind the ball.  I'd hate to watch that football but it is the easiest tactic to try to get a result.  We'd never accept that at Rangers, although maybe Walter did a bit of that on our run to the UEFA cup final.

 

Unfortunately our central defence is too brittle at the moment and we give away easy goals.  If we get that sorted we'd be turning most of our losses to draws or wins.  That in itself is enough to win this league.  If we then add a number 10 to the team, I'd Ben happy to bet on us winning the league next season.

Edited March 20, 2018 by Gaffer

[MacK1950 2,399]

Really don't see where folks are coming from we were in no way the dominant team,sure we had bulk of possession,but did not utilise it properly.

What went wrong? main thing IMO was why make one pass when two will do really gave Killie time to re-organise.Too many times where the ball could have gone to a wide player but was passed via a central player nobody had confidence to make the "killer" pass.

[colinstein 294]

I made a comment earlier about how killie cut us open down our right...at the same time I thought Tavs had a good game. I saw a post about Steve Clarck's subs that explained some things...but I can't find it