Two-striker systems, especially this season, seemed to become the cheat code for beating Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United and there is another on the way this week.
As the entire campaign has shown, it became easier to beat the Whites in 2021/22. Force Bielsa into a back-three, apply a high press and generally watch his side struggle for the afternoon.
When lynchpins like Liam Cooper, Kalvin Phillips and Patrick Bamford have been missing it’s made it all the harder to make the 3-3-1-3 formation work.
Everton’s recent hammering was possibly the plainest example yet of that formation’s struggles in this season.
Aston Villa have won their last two matches with a total of six goals scored and none conceded after switching to a 4-4-2 diamond.
Steven Gerrard wants to accommodate both Danny Ings and Ollie Watkins in the same side and the switch to this narrower shape seems to be paying off.
When you combine the two-man strikeforce and the threat of an in-form Philippe Coutinho, who on Saturday subjected Southampton to the kind of torture he gave Leeds at Villa Park last month, it’s easy to imagine the strain Bielsa’s 3-3-1-3 may have been under.
Coutinho was tracked by Luke Ayling throughout much of that 3-3 draw last month, but had the quality to find the space he needed to pull the strings in a Villa performance which burned brightly, but not for very long in Birmingham.
With Jesse Marsch now at the helm, there is a fresh opportunity to look at how this new Leeds team will fare against two strikers and an elusive playmaker, who is unlikely to be followed around the pitch as he might have done with Bielsa in the dugout.
A two-man pivot, like the one we saw in Saturday’s 4-2-3-1, with no man-marking instructions of Coutinho, who has the freedom to wander where he wishes, could provide Leeds with the platform to win they may not have done previously.
Marsch has said he will be flexible, he will change formations, he will change the way the team presses from game to game.
Based on how much more solid the side looked on Saturday at Leicester City, and the statistics showed it, there will be high hopes a two-man attack does not expose Leeds in the same way it did earlier this season.
