Posted by

Michele Tossani ,

July 10, 2012 Twitter: @MicheleTossani

Read this on your iPhone/iPad or Android device



Nesta's arrival and building around Di Vaio Italian central defender Alessandro Nesta has now officially signed with the Montreal Impact and will join his friend Marco Di Vaio. Nesta arrives to the city with the task of shoring up, or fixing, Montreal's defense. Even with a come from behind 2-1 victory Sunday night, head coach Jesse Marsch will no doubt be disappointed in his side showing their defensive weakness in allowing 35 goals until now.



Prior to the Columbus win, losses to Sporting Kansas City, DC United and Toronto FC confirmed defending can be improved. One guy can't resolve issues alone but Nesta will help. There are questions about his durability, but talent and experience are there. With Nelson Rivas injured, and Matteo Ferrari on rehab, Marsch was looking for someone to restore his team defensive shape. Nesta should gave him that.



On the other side of the ball, in one tactical decision Marsch switched to a 4-2-3-1 in the way to exploit the advantage of playing with four offensive players and to make Montreal more consistent offensively. As the 2010 World Cup showed, 4‑2‑3‑1 became the new universal system of play.



Marsch adopted an offensive oriented brand of soccer built around central forward skills of Di Vaio, supported by inside runs of Davy Arnaud, Felipe and Justin Mapp. With Bernardo Corradi out for the rest of the season, Di Vaio is in charge of the scoring duties.



The edge of using four offensive players is that it provides to have more dangerous players on the pitch at the same time, all able to create a lot of combinations between them, building creative attacking schemes that can make goal scoring chances happen easier. With the attacking midfielders and the wide open players reaching up top the lone forward, it can easily switch to a 4‑2‑1‑3 pattern.



Traditionally the 4-2-3-1 system, such as 4-2-4, is a 6-4 pattern, with the defensive line and two holding midfielders having the duty to defend and with the 4 offensive guys up top playing as attackers. The key points in this formation are the identity of the wide players and the work of the attacking midfielder behind the lone forward.



The playmaker, operating close to the central forward, can break the rivals’ defensive system. He play in a dangerous zone because the opponents can have troubles getting him: they have to choice if chase him with a central defender or with a holding midfielder. Answer to this question could create confusion.



Against Sporting Kansas City, we got some good combinations between the attacking midfielder, Felipe, and the centre-forward, Di Vaio. Let's take a look at the way Montreal exploited fast-breaks utilizing combinations between Felipe and Di Vaio. On the first two pics, Di Vaio plays an 1-2 punch with Felipe which plays looking for the depth with the third player: In the third and fourth pics, another ball was coming from their own half of pitch. Di Vaio plays a 1-2 combination with Felipe then he ran over the defensive line. Both the opportunities came from 1-2 punches in which the first ball was coming to the central forward, Marco Di Vaio. Both scoring chances was nullified by individual mistakes but Montreal needs to continue to exploit those plays. Michele Tossani is a football tactician with a Ph.D. in History. Michele resides in Florence, Italy and is a tactical analyst for Futbol-Tactico.com