Playing 442 involves different roles for the players... It is a big difference, 2 strikers instead of 1... More support in the box, and another man to aim at... Starting positions count, not just how they play when they get the ball
It doesn't mean any of those things.
Compare the 4-4-2 Spain played in Euro2008 to the 4-4-2 that Stoke City play and they are almost polar opposites from each other in terms of style of play.
The idea that one up front makes the striker "isolated" and "doesn't give him support" is just nonsense, there are plenty of teams who play with no recognised striker that still score goals by the bucketload. Ditto there are also plenty of teams who play 4-4-2 who have one striker who is isolated up front (us under Pearson in the first half of our play-off season for one). It's not a case of having one more player to aim at, how many player you have to aim at is simply a case of which of the 10 other players on your team are in space or in good attacking positions on that particular individual attack.
If a striker is isolated its because he is not getting support from his players, but this is not because of some set formation. Formation is not inherently anything, it's not inherently attacking or defensive, it does not inherently isolate or give players support. These things all come about by the style in which the manager actually wants him to play, how the individual players interact with each other and on the tens of thousands of individual decisions the 22 players and 3 officials make between them over the course of 90 minutes. One 4-3-3 can give its striker excellent support whereas another can isolate them, but 4-3-3 in and itself does neither of those things.
If you think our style of play isn't working then for some reason fans think the formation is automatically to blame, but much, much more likely it's just the way we are interpreting the game withing that formation, rather than the actual formation. It could be that our wingers just need to give better support to our striker, it could be that we need to stop trying "hollywood passes," it could be that our defence need to stop passing the ball to the opposition, it could be that one of our midfielders isn't covering the defence enough, or isn't helping the attack enough, it could just be that our players had an off day and the opposition made much less mistakes on the day, it could be all of those things. I don't know, I don't claim to be some tactical mastermind like a lot of our fans do, but I'm certainly not going to jump to some conclusion that we shouldn't be playing some formation because we've lost a couple of games playing it.
How will that help?!?
Woteva.
