THE CONCRETE ROUNDABOUT (TCR)

We need both, I reckon. Always liked the target man/fox in the box combination.

One of the best kept secrets around.....

Seriously, it's horses for courses. I think it was Gary Neville who made the point on the telly that modern centre backs meet strike pairs so rarely these days as everybody seems to have a single striker up top, that they are uncomfortable when they do have to face them. Having a target man who is big and strong enough to mix it with central defenders so that they can't simply bully the smaller type of striker and have an easy afternoon as they often do is not a bad option to have.

I wonder why you don’t see it very often.

Because the fashion these days is for single striker formations. But what goes around comes around so in a few years' time somebody will doubtless win the Premiership with it.....oh wait, I forgot about Leicester.......

I don’t think managers make their decisions based on fashion.

An awful lot of managers do seem fixated on a particular style. So I wasn't surprised to hear a pundit seriously suggesting that the right thing to do was to make your players play in your style, get rid of any who won't or can't and replace them with players who will. So you get an insistence that the 'right' way is to play out from the back all the time and anybody who isn't happy doing this is got rid of, for example. This pundit was basically suggesting that there was no need for a Plan B as this would undermine the philosophy which the manager was going to instill.

Now that might work sometimes for top clubs with enormous budgets. But for lesser mortals it's not practical to do this and they have to manage with the players they've got and to find a blend which suits them, rather than the other way round.

We've had our own recent examples of managers who only ever played one way, no matter what and had no Plan B. Tisdale seems to be more pragmatic, thank the Lord!

Perhaps fashion isn’t the right word because it implies a lack of thought and a sheepish adherence to a way of doing things. But there are definitely prevailing paradigms in all areas of professional endeavour: medicine, child care, business management etc. and football is no different.

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I don't need your ill-informed, half-baked, idiotic opinions. I have plenty of those myself.

Perhaps evolution is a better word than paradigms.

Quality of pitches being a big part of the evolution.