Analysis: West Ham

West Ham set up in a 4-1-4-1 formation, with Declan Rice in between the defence and midfield. Andriy Yarmolenko, Mark Noble, Robert Snodgrass and Felipe Anderson completed the midfield behind Marko Arnautovic in attack.

The middle of the pitch was extremely congested throughout, with both teams packing the area with numbers when out of possession. This meant West Ham were somewhat limited to the wide areas, and thus focused their efforts on trying to exploit the space in behind the Tottenham centre-back and full-back on both sides.

To do so, Arnautovic would make early runs between Toby Alderweireld and Ben Davies, or Snodgrass would make later, deeper runs between Kieran Trippier and Davinson Sanchez. The trigger for this movement was the ball being sent wide to a player positioned near the touchline – most often one of the full-backs, but occasionally Yarmolenko or Anderson. West Ham created a few chances from this strategy, but it tended to be from penetrative runs behind the full-backs and crosses into the box.

West Ham remained in their 4-1-4-1 structure out of possession and tried to protect the centre of the pitch as much as possible, maintaining a very compact shape. Rice was tasked with picking up the Tottenham players drifting between the lines; the midfield four shifted between a flat shape, in which they would remain close together, and a trapezium-type shape where Noble and Snodgrass would be on a similar horizontal line but eight to 10 yards ahead of Yarmolenko and Anderson, who would be outside the central two but deeper.

With this, any passes that Tottenham played out wide to their advancing full-backs wouldn’t take West Ham’s wider midfield players out of the game. In fact, it would mean that the West Ham full-backs could engage with their wide opponent, and Yarmolenko and Anderson would not have too much distance to travel to cover their full-backs inside, as they were already positioned reasonably deep and in the half-spaces.