Jamie Carragher made a key point about Jason Steele which gave Brighton a huge boost in their 3-1 win over Manchester United on Saturday afternoon.
Steele was preferred over summer signing Bart Verbruggen in net at Old Trafford, as Brighton secured a surprise but deserved win to stretch their winning streak against United to four games.
Carragher was full of praise for Roberto De Zerbi with his tactical changes after the first goal, when Danny Welbeck scored against his former club.
“What gave them the opportunity to change was actually scoring the first goal,” Carragher explained on Monday Night Football on Sky Sports.
“Dunk goes over to De Zerbi and they are trying to get to the bottom of what is going on. He talks to his centre-back and you can see it quite clearly. He mentions what the formation is and tells him what he has to do.
“You see him pointing and what he is talking about is that [Lewis] Dunk and [Jan Paul] Van Hecke have to go wider.
“Where we normally see the Brighton centre-backs stay narrow and entice people onto them, they decided they instead needed to go wider because that’s where the space was.
“What that did, which I thought was really interesting, was that it brought the goalkeeper more into the game. He’s very good on the ball, [Jason] Steele, we know that.
“But if we look at his pass maps from his first two games of the season, we see that the centre-backs are higher up and narrow, and there are a lot of passes through the centre of the pitch.
“We then come to the game against Manchester United. The centre-backs are deeper and wider and you don’t see passes going [through the centre of the pitch] too often, because that’s where Manchester United had their numbers.
“The space was down the sides and that’s where we saw the goalkeeper playing his passes.”
Jamie Carragher on Jason Steele’s passes
Carragher then made the point about how many passes Jason Steele made in the game on Saturday compared to his average last season. Steele completed 53 passes against Manchester United, compared to his 34 average from last season.
“He’s a lot more involved in the game, the reason being that because the centre-backs split so far, he almost had to be the middle centre-back and get involved a lot more. I thought that was really good.”