Welcome to my opposition report on Burnley FC, where I will look to give you some information about our opposition and what threats they pose, what formation we should expect and which key players we should watch out for.
Firstly as I always do I will look over their formation, Burnley are very strict in both their tactical identity and formation and have been for most of their time with Sean Dyche. Dyche employs a 4-4-2 system which looks something like the below. Below are the players who started in their last match vs Man Utd.
Burnley similarly have quite a small squad and they were missing a couple of key players in this recent game, most key amongst those is Maxwell Cornet, their top scorer with 5 goals thus far. They are also missing Nick Pope in goal.
As I said before, Burnley have a very clear cut tactical ethos, most people identify them as a team who sits back, plays the ball long and puts a lot of crosses into their Target Man usually being Chris Wood.
They do allow opposition more of the ball in general with the 3rd lowest average possession with 39.8% average possession.
However they are very capable of pressing oppositions when the need arises, while they aren’t in the top 10 for high pressures they do sit pretty high amongst the other 10 sitting 14th for high pressures with 34 high pressures p90.
They heavily favour being strong structurally and players don’t often deviate from their assigned position, when in defensive shape they keep their backline very narrow, allowing opposition space in the wide areas, knowing they can deal with most crosses as they have two very aerially dominant defenders in Tarkowski & Mee.
As they are away I would imagine they would allow us a lot of the ball, but we will have to watch out for their counter attacks, especially as it looks like Maxwell Cornet is going to be able to play. Cornet is a totally different player to Burnley’s usual type of forward.
Cornet is a very versatile player and one who there were some tentative links to Leeds before he ultimately signed for Burnley. Below is a breakdown of Cornet on a stats level including all his positions(which are many)
Most of Cornet’s appearances have been upfront but at first he was played a couple of times on the Left Wing for Burnley, but since he’s been moved upfront he hasn’t played anywhere else.
His biggest strength for Burnley so far has been his finishing, he is vastly exceeding his xG this season scoring 5 goals from 1.5xG and has had 69% of his shots on target. This is still a relatively small sample size and I doubt he will continue at this level but it’s still a very promising start to his Premier League career.
Cornet is a hard working forward who will attempt to disrupt our defensive buildup, he averages around 15 pressures p90 and with a combined 1.8 interceptions & tackles p90 he is capable of winning the ball.
As I said before he is vastly exceeding his xG, part of this has been his long range finishing, of his 5 goals he has scored 2 from outside the box, so we need to limit his long shot taking as he could punish us. Meslier may have to do the usual Meslier things and pull off some incredible saves.
Cornet is clearly the one to look out for when it comes to goal scoring this season however we should be just as wary of Chris Wood, we are without our best aerial defender in Liam Cooper so will need to try to limit the crosses into the box as Wood is a very capable goal scorer from headers as we are well aware of from his time with us.
Burnley don’t have many players who create chances for them however one we need to keep an eye on is Dwight McNeil, he completes the most crosses p90 for Burnley with 0.96 completed p90, he also completes the second most passes to the penalty area for them with 1.46 p90.
McNeil is also their best ball carrier completing 1.8 dribbles p90 & 5.6 Progressive carries. Both of these are the best at Burnley and as we know we can get exposed by players capable of running at us directly.
Now I want to move onto us as I’ve covered Burnley quite well. We should be welcoming back a number of injured players for this game and should hopefully have at least 2 or 3 actual first team players on our bench.
Bielsa has confirmed in his press conference that he will welcome back Diego Llorente, Dan James, Junior Firpo & Jack Harrison. Patrick Bamford is recovered but unlikely to start based on what Bielsa said. Pascal Struijk wasn’t mentioned but I believe he is close to a return.
We are likely to play 3-4-3 or some variation of this, this will give us the required shape so we can employ our man marking strategy and this should look something like the below.
The above is just my best guess at what Bielsa will do, there are other possibilities to consider. For example Gelhardt could come into the squad and replace Klich which would drop Roberts back to midfield.
Additionally there is a small chance, and this is one I would love. That Struijk is fit and available as there are rumours of him doing well in training. If so, Struijk would come into the defence and we could see Koch play in midfield.
As always it is very difficult to predict what Bielsa will do and who will play where, he has more options in this game than the last couple which confounds this issue but either way I feel this is a match we can win with the squad at our disposal.
We have much more individual quality than Burnley possess and they are one of the few sides who have had a worse season than us, only winning 1 game so far this season. They haven’t played much football recently which means they aren’t as match sharp as we are.
I watched most of their recent game vs Man Utd and they looked off their usual levels for most of the game fitness wise and largely the game was taken control of by Man U.
I hope this match can kick-start the second half of our season and give us a good start to the new year.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this read and learned something about our opponents on Sunday.
Thanks once again for reading and I hope you enjoy the game.
Martin Riley
Twitter - https://twitter.com/MartinCBMRiley
Stats sourced from https://fbref.com/en/ & https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/