Playing three centre-halves at the back isn't necessarily defensive if it gives the fullback/wingback license to get forward and lets them abdicate some defensive work or allows a defensive midfielder to be more attack orientated. And it's a way of getting more height into set-pieces.
That may be more preferential and help the attack more than playing a simply not good enough attacking player who offers nothing to the 11.
Unfortunately the only player with any desire to go forward yesterday was Pickford. The cowardice in possession was shocking and dragged every midfielder backwards as they came looking for the ball that never went forward. Even Digne was stopping and passing sideways once he hit the halfway line. He should be well forward if there's a third central defender to drift left and cover him.
This is perfectly true if you're Chelsea and you have fabulous delivery from Reece James on the right and Chilwell/Alonso from the left, Kante doing all of the dirty work by himself in midfield and Jorginho who is excellent at taking the ball off his defenders.
We don't have any of those qualities, not to mention that our most experienced centre back
Michael Keane clearly hates playing in a back 3. It also gives far too much attacking responsibility to
Seamus Coleman who's output in the final third has been really poor for a long time now. It's also meant dropping Tom Davies who has done very little wrong in the last few months to bring back Mason Holgate who has done a lot wrong in over the same period.
If you don't have the tools at your disposal then in it's a horrible system to play because the extra man at the back, rather than in the middle, always encourages the pass backwards, and our players hardly need an excuse to do that at the best of times!
Call me old fashioned, but if you need to win games then you need to score goals, and ordinarily there's a higher probability of you doing that if you have more numbers further up the pitch. There's certainly a place for the occasional back five ploy, it worked well against West Ham and in some other matches, but against Villa and Sheff Utd, the onus was totally on us. We had to play with reckless abandon and throw caution to the wind. Instead we played with a wall at the back, rolled over and got our tummies tickled.
