Burnwinter wrote:
My theory is that the overall decline in defending is due to the tactical variations involving sitting midfielders and attacking fullbacks that have become commonplace over the past few years.
In particular it's because of the decline of the central midfielder in my opinion. I can think of four or five who are genuinely good two-way players in Premier League, and we have one of them to be fair. It's been a problem ever since they started to merge philosophies in the late nineties. Rinus Michels had it nailed down, Arrigo Sacchi had it nailed down. Both created solid systems with room for individual creativity. Nowadays, instead of having a balanced team you end up with a bunch of specialists, who require even more specialists to cover for their deficiencies in another area of the field, and so on.
