Dutch teams can play 4-3-3 because they've played it for decades.
Barcelona have played it for years.
Last season some people said Arsenal played like Barcelona but I saw very little similarity between them.
Arsenal beat Man United and Chelsea and finished fourth and won nothing.Barcelona beat Chelsea and Man United and won three trophies.No comparison, no similarity.
If you have deadly wide players, and a technical muscleman like Yaya Toure, you have a chance of making 4-3-3 work.Samuel Eto'o was fiery, fast, prolific, could switch wide on both sides, so 4-3-3 worked for him. There are not many like him. Eto'o is the best African player ever and one of the finest strikers of the last 25 years.
Ibrahimovic is colossal and mercurial, an enigmatic giant. We don’t yet know how he will function in Barcelona’s 4-3-3, which demands consistency from every component.
Suggestions that Arsenal will try out 4-3-3 again in a friendly in Valencia on Saturday, prior to employing that system at Everton seem bizarre, to say the least.
What about the CLQ ? Do Gooners really think Arsene Wenger will play 4-3-3 in a £40 million Champions League Qualifier against opponents we will know after Friday's draw? Bollocks ! The Titanic will be raised before that happens. Obama will provide universal health care to the biggest economy in the world before that happens.
Mostly, Arsenal play with five or six in midfield, so they can carry passengers.
If you don't play 4-3-3 perfectly, you will lose the ball and be caught with ONE in midfield and get thrashed out of sight in game after game.
Clearly, Song is not Yaya Toure or Rijkaard or Senna - and neither is Denilson.
Bendtner has played wide in the Emirates Cup, but he is no Overmars, no Messi, and never will be.
Fabregas can play a Xavi role, or even an Iniesta role, although he is not as zippy as Iniesta or as spiky as Xavi.
Rosicky and Nasri could imitate Xavi and Iniesta but that would leave Fabregas marooned deep for most of the game, picking up balls from his back four. He wants to be more mobile than that. And the manager wants him to roam forward and invent goals.
We know that Wenger was very taken with the way Spain played to win Euro 2008. Who would not be? I mean, seriously, who would not be impressed by how they played? Spain were superb.
But Wenger can’t copy that because Spain have two of the hottest strikers on the planet (Fernando Torres and David Villa) plus Senna, an authoritative defensive midfielder who can tackle, play long passes, and hold a team together.
Arsenal have no Senna, no Torres, no Villa.They have no Eto'o either.
Yes, Arshavin is better than Henry and Wilshere does some of the things that Messi does, but he's a novice. The finest, boldest, most confident novice we’ve seen since Rooney, but a novice nevertheless.
Players make systems, systems don't make players. And Wenger's current personnel is just not appropriate to playing 4-3-3. Unless he buys a fast, brave experienced, very determined striker (someone as good as Klinsmann or Torres) AND a Senna clone, it's a non-starter.
In Pep Guardiola’s formation, the roles of each player are very defined, very specific, very much tied to one area of the pitch. Although, of course, all good football is fluid to a degree and allows positional interchange.
In the current treble-winning Barcelona team, each player is tailored to the role he plays. Busquets has been brought up in that system and knows how to play it and was coached by Guardiola, who was a deep playmaker himself. At the Nou Camp, 4-3-3 isn't a formation, it's a way of life .Each player is honed for a specialised role and performs that role in a very disciplined manner, playing in a grid, a strict pattern.
Barcelona are far superior to Arsenal tactically. They can forage and press and win the ball early, as we saw their reserves doing in the Wembley Cup last month. Those kids, the princes of pressing, gave an exhibition of organised energy that was awesome.
Their 4-3-3 is a high-energy game than needs well-schooled players with brains.
It’s insane to suggest that Arsenal can switch to 4-3-3 after a couple of friendlies against Austrian village teams, a few coaching sessions, and a soft home friendly against an Atletico Madrid team who were still on their holidays.
It's not because I don't like 4-3-3. I love experiments as much as the next armchair tactician.
But 4-3-3 will not work with these players. Song, Eboue, Bendtner, Denilson, van Persie and Walcott could not play 4-3-3 effectively. I'll stake my reputation on that.
By Myles Palmer
http://www.arsenalnewsreview.co.uk/inde ... eturnid=42