2014

Player Positional Tracker: Man Utd v QPR

By Antonio | September 14, 2014
2014

Player Positional Tracker: Man Utd v QPR

Man United 4 vs 0 QPR United ran out a very comfortable victor as QPR put in a pretty weak challenge today at Old Trafford. Below are the separate Player Positional trackers for the two halves, along with some things that I noticed from viewing our vizs.  If you click on an image it will open in a larger window. 1st Half:

  • There was huge interest before the match as people wondered just how van Gaal would line up his new look team.  He went with a 4-3-1-2 formation with Blind playing as the defensive midfielder and Mata playing behind the front two of Rooney and RVP
  • As Mike Goodman pointed out on Twitter during the game, playing four at the back didn't really change that much much from the 3 (or 5) at the back that LvG played earlier this season.  Daley Blind played so deep that he was almost taking up the same positions that Smalling did in United's season opener at Old Trafford against SwanseaMike
  • United had total dominance for the first 15 minutes.  This can be seen in a number of ways; virtually all the players were shown in the QPR half, the tiny dots representing the QPR players and the fact that de Gea didn't appear on this viz until 15 minutes had elapsed on the clock
  • United favoured the left side when attacking, di Maria largely held his left wing place and was joined by Rooney.  On the other side, Herrera was notionally named as the right sided midfielder, but the PPT shows that he played a very central role
  • Of United's attacking talent, RVP had minimal enough attacking involvement during the opening period (can be seen by the small size of his dot)

  MUNvQPRH1 2nd Half:

  • It's always much harder to make real sense of these 2nd half PPTs as substitutions are made; players are withdrawn and the newly introduced players have volatile movements as their relatively few touches makes it difficult for our code to smooth the locations of their actions
  • United controlled the second half; the red dots were consistently larger than QPR's blue dots

MUNvQPRH2