Aurelio Andreazzoli just kamikazed himself out of Genoa’s bench. It’s inevitable considering the reckless approach he chose for the team.
Nothing has gone well for Genoa this season; they haven’t won in six games. They have also conceded 20 goals this season, the most in Serie A. Worse, they are extremely bad in defending counter-attacks:
Other than Napoli this season, Genoa fare the worst against the counter-attack in Serie A since 2016/17. We can trace the reason back to how Andreazzoli wanted Genoa to play
Genoa have two talented strikers in Christian Kouame and Andrea Pinamonti. Both are big, strong, and physical. Andreazzoli saw them as the biggest assets in the squad. He wanted his players to deliver the ball to them as soon as possible:
Kouame and Pinamonti may not be supremely technical, but they can get past the defender if given space. They could also combine with each other or hold the ball for their non-stop runner, like Lukas Lerager, to overlap. Playing them together means you can bypass a lot of build-ups. Andreazzoli thought that direct vertical longballs toward them should be the way to go:
No one uses more vertical longball to create chances than Genoa since 2016/17. Even though they have always relied on it, Andreazzoli increased their reliance this year by more than 30%.
But you can’t just keep hitting the longball to the striker unless you want to sit deep and concede possessions as Crotone did. Andreazzoli wanted Genoa to dominate the possession. He used various ways to create space. For example, there is the normal switching to the flank:
But Andreazzoli didn’t think that using the horizontal space was enough, he wanted the vertical one too:
He had both sided center backs, Cristian Romero and Domenico Criscito, receive the ball almost on the byline when Genoa “built up” from the back:
He wanted to use them to invite the opponent for confrontations so that they could create room for Kouame and Pinamonti to attack the defenders immediately when they received the longball.
It is a creative approach. It worked well (kind of) in the offensive phase. But it obliterated Genoa’s transitional defense:
The wide distance between the players both horizontally and vertically means that Genoa was rarely ready to counter-press lost balls. But here is the killer: you lose a lot of the possessions if you play too many longballs:
Genoa’s tight man-marking coupled with the large amount of space they generated also means that they couldn’t use offsides in the defense very rigorously:
All of these things combine and you have one of the worst defensive teams in Serie A.
Andreazzoli’s approach is creative but it’s also reckless. Last year in Empoli he had them dominate the possession without any technical superiority. If he keeps approaching the game so recklessly he will for sure kamikaze his way back to the lower divisions.
