Everton 2 Fulham 1

I made my way up to the pub more in hope than expectation for yesterday afternoon's fixture. Everton have consistently failed to beat clubs that are lower in the league than them and the two teams have drawn 27 times between them this season. This one had nil-nil written all over it.
From a tactical point of view I was interested to see how Moyes would react to the latest injury crisis, that is, the loss of Arteta. In the past few games he has employed Mikel wide on the left in order to counter their increasingly predictable (and therefore easy to counter) reliance on Leighton Baines galloping up the left. The answer this time was to play Leon Osman inside him in a similar role to that played by Steven Pienaar before his departure to Spurs in the January transfer window.
The rest of the team lined up like this: A back four of Hibbert (a welcome return in my view as he is a good honest defender of the kind you don't see that much nowadays), Jagielka, Distin and Baines. In midfield, Neville sat in front of the defence, Coleman had an attacking role down the right, Rodwell played through the centre (generally tending to drift left), Osman played down the left as I mentioned  above, and Cahill, returning from injury, played in the hole behind Saha, the lone striker up front.
When in possession Everton played their usual mix of slow out of defence and long balls to the front men. Fulham when defending, used the tactic which has been so successful against Everton this season, namely pressing when the ball is in the Everton half, then quickly dropping back to 2 banks of 5 when the ball crosses the half-way line..
The long ball tactic worked better than usual for Everton, not because they got decent possession straight from it, but because the Fulham defenders tended to hack the ball into touch.
What Fulham seemed to be trying to do was hit Everton on the break, but this tactic wasn't very successful, mainly because Hibbert did a fine job of shepherding Andy Johnson out wide and into the left corner. I don't think Johnson got a single cross in all match and he certainly didn't have a shot at goal.
The interesting tactical battle was the way that Fulham tried to deal with Everton's wide men, Baines and Osman on the left and Coleman and Hibbert on the right. What they did was, whenever Everton got into the danger zone, around the edge of the penalty area, two defenders and two midfielders would form a very tight box to try to deny the attackers space and options. In the end, this proved to be Fulham's undoing as Baines very cleverly feinted to cross but cut the ball back to Osman, who was stood on the corner of the penalty area. He then beat one man and gained enough space to float the ball over to Coleman. Coleman was un-marked since the whole Fulham defence had been pulled over to the left to deal with the threat from Osman.
The second goal was much simpler tactically. A driving run from Rodwell saw him fouled on the edge of the penalty area and the resulting free kick saw Saha combine power and accuracy to thread the ball through a gap in the wall and into the back of the net.
The consolation goal for Fulham came from that usual source, an attack down the right into the space left by Baines. To be fair, it was a very well worked move that required a pin-point finish from Fulham's American striker. However, once again, Everton were undone by a fast break and what seems to be an over-reliance on Distin to cover too much of the left-hand side.

Management Patterns: High cohesion - low coupling

In their seminal book, Structured Design  Larry Constantine said that high cohesion (the degree to which the internal contents of a module are related) and loose coupling (the degree to which a module depends upon other modules) were desirable aspects of a well designed programme. I think that these tenets can be taken and applied to the design of organisations and teams.
In an organisation, the equivalent of a module (for my purposes at least) is a team. A team exhibits high cohesion when all of its members are focused on the same business goal, when the communication between team members is fast, accurate and relevant to achieving the goal and when all the resources it needs are either under control of the team or can easily be acquired and accessed by the team.
In an organisational context, coupling is a measure of how teams interact. Team are loosely coupled if the responsibilities of teams are clearly defined and when, on the occasion that a team needs something from another team to achieve its ends, the mechanisms for doing this are clear and well known.
In order for teams to be highly cohesive and loosely coupled they have to be exist in order to achieve a business goal. They have to be made up of people with different skills that when they come together they can achieve something that they could not possibly do separately. A great example of this is a film crew. This consists of a lot of people with specific skills (including technical and organisational skills) that are brought together for a specific task.
The alternative to this is teams that are based on functions rather than business goals. This is the great anti-pattern of matrix management, to which I will return in a future blog.