By The Red Devil Ranter
So we’re doing this, huh?
We’re really going all-in on Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-3, aka The Formation That Dreams Are Made Of….if your dreams involve sterile possession, wing-backs with vertigo, and a midfield that vanishes when pressed by a bus stop in Hounslow Brentford.
Let me say it loud: I don’t hate Ruben.
I want to love him.
He’s got swagger, he’s young, he says the right things in pressers like he’s rehearsed them in front of a mirror while listening to The Foo Fighters. He wears that black tracksuit like a man who thinks he’s reinventing football.
But here’s the problem: it’s not working.
And more worryingly, it’s never worked here.
The 3-4-3 that looked slick at Sporting? That was in a league where the fifth-best team has players working part-time at Nando’s. You could play a back three there with Phil Jones, Danny Welbeck, and a traffic cone and still finish top four.
Here, in the Premier League, it turns into a 5-3-2 faster than you can say “Ugarte’s lost it again” Our wing-backs don’t bomb forward, they timidly jog up the pitch, turn around, and pass backwards like they’re scared of sunlight. Dalot spends half the match stuck in a positional identity crisis, and tackles with all the strength of a Teletubby on Valium.
The midfield? Ugarte, Mainoo, Casemiro, Bruno… pick any two. They all get swallowed whole. The spacing is off. The build-up is glacial. The physicality, nonexistent. And when we lose the ball? Oh baby, we backpedal like we just heard a car alarm go off.
You can see the players thinking. “Where am I supposed to be?” “Who do I press?” “Why are we still doing this?”
And the worst part? There’s no Plan B. No in-game adjustment. No switch to a classic 4-2-3-1 when it’s going pear-shaped. Unless you count lumping Maguire up front and launching long balls straight from the Charles Hughes manual (look it up). Spoiler: it doesn’t count. It can’t count. And more importantly, it shouldn’t count. Not in 2025.
Ruben, mate, I see what you’re going for, bold, visionary, a tactical Picasso. You’ve admitted to borrowing tactics from others before, but unless your masterpiece is titled “Abstract Art FC: A Study in Sideways Passing”, you might want to borrow a brush from someone who’s painted a winning picture before.
