Based on last week’s fallout from Fratton Park there’s one thing we can be certain about Joey Barton when it comes to selecting his Bristol Rovers team: he won’t ever be playing 4-4-2.
How much he decides to stray away from the Mike Bassett-endorsed traditional “English” format is anyone’s guess, but the radical 3-3-3-1 deployed on the south coast was pushing the envelope pretty far.
Barton and his staff are confident there were enough good moments over the 90 minutes against Portsmouth to indicate that the system is one worth persisting with long-term, it just needs some refining on the training ground.
