Style of play.

[Council Juice]

The passing philosophy is fine I'd love good passing football if we were capable of it.

 

Lets use two very good models of passing football with success.

 

1) Barcelona - Do they play with wingers? Why yes they do.

 

2) Bayern Munich - Do they play with winger? Why yes they do.

 

All we acheive by packing the centre of the park is removing any space for the creative players to work in rather than allow for chances to be created in the centre.

 

All defences in the league must be loving the thought of playing us right now.

 

No plan B and plan A is useless to start with.

Both these teams are quite poor examples of teams using wingers as they tend to rely on them being inverted winger (ie playing on the wrong foot and cutting in) Barca really don't use their wingers for wide play at all. The likes of Dani Alves is their main wide outlet.

Bayern are slightly different in that Robben and Ribery despite playing on the wing not to their strongest foot still provide a lot of width and are devastating at then cutting in. But Rafina and Alaba are the players putting the bye line crosses in. 

However, you don't need wingers, just width. Look at the successful AC Milan team of the mid 2000s (won the champions league in 03 and 07). Played with a narrow 4 midfield diamond where Pirlo sat in the anchor libero role and was protected for his play dictating by the likes of Gattuso and Ambrosini. In front of them an offensive midifelder, often kaka or Seedorf.

However, they had the Brazian Tokely... Cafu. Followed by Oddo. Or on the other side Jankulovski, Serginho etc Very attacking minded full backs who spent argueably more time pushing up that defending. This was due to the cover given by Ambrosini and Gattuso.

My point being its not wingers that are necessarily required. Just the option of a wide option which it sounds to me that Hughes is completely overlooking.

[Sneckboy]

That was a cracking AC Milan side. They're certainly not the force they were. They may struggle to regain the greatness of old - a bit like Ajax. Serie A is also a poor imitation of its former self, with only Juventus being strong on a continental basis.