Sheffield United return to league action on Tuesday night against Russell Martin’s Swansea City.
The Blades come into this game in 1st place, while the Swans are in 19th place.
Russell Martin has been playing 4-3-3 for the majority of the season, however, Swansea have moved to a wingback system whenever they’ve come up against a wingback system themselves.
This is how I think Swansea City will line up on Tuesday night:
In all honesty, this is the first time this season where I have no idea what the starting line-up could look like. They could end up playing a back 4. Michael Obafemi could partner Joel Piroe up top, but the former has been dropped by Martin recently because of attitude problems.
One thing I do know about Swansea however is their style of play. They want to dominate the ball and keep passes short, so they leave teams with fewer opportunities to counterattack them.
Here is the pass map and average positions for Swansea in one of the games where they played with wingbacks:
You can see they want the wingbacks high up the pitch which will help them dominate the ball. Harry Darling is one of the better progressive passers in the division, and as you can see here he is feeding the ball into Grimes to progress Swansea up the pitch. It will be up to United to try and screen that pass into Grimes. Manning and Ntcham posed the biggest threat in this game, but Ntcham was quiet in possession in terms of volume, but his threat was still there.
Just in case Swansea play 4 at the back, I’ll show you the passing map and average positions of them in that shape:
What’s interesting here is, that the back line is a lot deeper, but they still have wide players pushed far up the field to try and gain control of the game. Again, like when they play with wingbacks, the left side is the side where they look to beat the press and progress. Interestingly they have a focal point in Cooper, who I predict to start over Obafemi. With the presence of Cooper up top, it allows Piroe to drop deeper to link the midfield with the attack.
It’ll be interesting to see the midfield battle of Sander Berge vs Ntcham if he plays. Size wise Berge is much bigger, but stylistically they possess similar traits. When Ntcham looks to drive forward, he is hard to stop and he glides past players with power and skill. Though Berge attempts more dribbles than him, Ntcham is a better passer in the opposition’s half than Berge.
When it comes to ball possession stats and accurate passes per game, Swansea are in the top 3 for both. However, it’s scoring goals and stopping them which continues to be a problem.
Russell Martin’s side dominates the ball and have plenty of shots on target per game, they rank 5th in the league, compared to United who ranks 1st.
They have missed 69% of the big chances that they have created this season, they have created 13 big chances across 8 games. This is the reason why Swansea are one of the lowest scorers in the division, having only scored 7 goals.
Looking at the infogol model, Swansea are underperforming and it’s mainly down to them not taking their chances. They should be sat around 12th place, not 19th. I believe this is the first time this season that the Blades are playing a team who is underperforming. For all these reasons, I expect a tough game and one where I’d happily take a point pre-kick-off.