Tactical Analysis: How Carles Cuadrat’s Mistakes Played Into Mumbai City’s Hands | OneFootball

The match between Bengaluru FC and Mumbai City was being built up as quite a big one, where the Blues were looking to bounce back from a disappointing run of two straight defeats, while the Islanders wanted to keep their winning streak going.

The game itself, however, wasn’t a great battle in any way, as Mumbai dominated it and came away with a convincing 3-1 victory.

In this analysis, we’ll take a look at why the match was such a walkover for the Islanders:

Bengaluru’s Confusing Defence

Bengaluru FC fielded a 4-2-3-1 on paper, but the defended in a 4-5-1 (or at least they tried to). The attacking midfielder and wingers collapsed into the midfield line out of possession, as you will see below:

Sometimes, we got to see some very intriguing shapes from Bengaluru FC.

This curious attempt at defending quite obviously failed and Bengaluru FC were quite lucky to be only two down at the break.

Mumbai City’s Field Day on the Left

In this way, Mumbai City created an absolute field day on the left for themselves, and they made the most of it too by scoring from one such situation.

Bengaluru’s Continued Set-Piece Woes

In the initial stages of this season and certainly, throughout the previous campaign, Bengaluru FC relied heavily on set-pieces to score their goals. However, lately, they’ve stopped scoring from dead-ball situations, but are conceding instead. Against Mumbai, they let two set-piece goals. Here’s how it went:

Bipin Singh delivered a corner deep to the far post region, but almost all of the Mumbai attackers moved to the near post to drag the Bengaluru defenders away. The only man who went to the far post was Hernán Santana, who easily outmuscled Harmanjot Khabra and headed the ball back across the box.

The header across was looping towards Mourtada Fall, who had isolated himself with Juanan despite all the congestion. Rahul Bheke also made a failed attempt of coming off the line and heading the ball, so the Senegalese defender powered his header into the goal from close range.

The Blues conceded from a corner in the second half too.

Here, Bengaluru FC have a 9-4 advantage in the box, yet they have allowed Mumbai City to create an overload on Semboi Haokip through Hernán Santana and Bartholomew Ogbeche due to their attempt at zonal marking. The area marked in blue is where the ball will be delivered, so Hernán takes Haokip in the opposite direction, while Mourtada Fall also evacuates it, taking a man with him.

Fall’s gravity took Cleiton Silva out of the area of the delivery, leaving only Fran González defending it. Ogbeche blindsided him with his run and had greater momentum, so he easily got to the ball first. While his header wasn’t exactly great, Gurpreet Singh Sandhu’s mistake gifted him a deserved goal.

So, Bengaluru FC set-piece woes continued, as they conceded their third and fourth set-piece goals of the season.

Conclusion

Mumbai City were at their best in the first half, when they blew an admittedly poor Bengaluru FC side away with their possession-play. Sergio Lobera did a great job of plotting to exploit Bengaluru’s weakness on their right, and his players executed his plans brilliantly.

Things are going steeply downhill for Carles Cuadrat’s side on the other hand. His selection of Deshorn Brown on the right will surely come into question, as will his tactics. While a portion of their attacking problems can be attributed to the lack of Ashique Kuruniyan, none of the issues we have discussed are related to that. Set-pieces, once the Blues’ best friend, have now become one of their main enemies.

A tale of two sides on two different paths this season – the mighty Bengaluru FC look to be falling, while Mumbai City are very much on course to their first-ever ISL title.