Muddled players confused by trendy Spanish system to blame for goal glut "Vidic has been a huge loss in terms of attacking the set-piece, putting his body on the line and telling the others what to do," says Gary Pallister, a centre-back in Ferguson's first championship-winning United team. You need an organiser, a Gary Neville or a Roy Keane to shout at people if they're not in the right place. They've missed Vidic for that. The captain has not been the only defender absent through injury. Pallister, who played every match in the 1992-93 Premier League season alongside his centre-back partner Steve Bruce, reckons that frequent enforced changes have taken their toll on United's resistance. "It's a culmination of little things," he says. Young players, inexperience and not knowing which goalkeeper is going to be there one week to the next. Mostly, though, there's never been a settled back four. Defence is all about continuity. Steve and I rarely missed games. That gives the defence a bedrock to perform. Or, as Alan Hansen puts it: "If Ferguson could select the Vidic and Ferdinand combination of five years ago all his problems would be eradicated immediately." Yet, although United's tissue-paper resistance this season may have specific cause, theirs is not the only defence leaking like a rusty Clyde tugboat. In the Premier League only Manchester City and Stoke City have thus far into the season managed to concede at an average rate of less than one goal a game. Parsimony appears to have gone out of fashion. And not every sieve-like backline can blame the absence of Vidic. Indeed, Sky pundit Gary Neville suggested recently that what we were watching was defenders befuddled by the newly fashionable attacking formations deployed by many Premier League managers. The 4-2-3-1 formation imported from the Spanish game is posing problems for defenders brought up to counter 4-4-2. Facing three mobile advanced midfielders playing behind a lone striker, constantly interchanging positions, Neville believes full-backs in particular seem uncertain what they should do defensively. Players such as Glen Johnson and Ashley Cole have long had licence to maraud upfield; now, without a specific opponent to mark, full-backs have become distracted by attacking possibilities, leaving behind them spaces that opponents can exploit. "Full-backs are definitely getting more time on the ball," Albiston notes. At United I think Patrice Evra and Rafael da Silva almost consider themselves auxiliary midfielders. A huge proportion of attacks start with them. As full-backs, even in my day, we were encouraged to get forward. But one way it has changed is that the full-back rarely lines up behind a wide man who doubles up to defend. In my time at United you'd be hugely helped by having Steve Coppell ahead of you. So if you went forward, Coppell would sit in and protect the space behind. Graeme Le Saux, the former Blackburn, Chelsea and England left-back, agrees with Neville that "formations have changed and defence is a little behind attack in terms of that change." He shares the worry about full-backs being constantly encouraged forward. "I prided myself on what I created, not what I stopped, so full-backs have always had a creative element," he says. But this season I've seen games in which both full-backs are bombing forward at the same time, which is something that would have had several managers I played under tearing their hair out. It does not help the attack-minded full-back that, unlike in Albiston's time, the new system appears to offer little help. "Full-backs don't have protection," says Le Saux. What tends to happen is you have two holding midfielders, sitting in front of the centre-backs. The full-backs are encouraged to bomb forward, thinking that the holding midfielders will protect them. But those guys are loath to go into wide areas. So there is a lot more space opening up on the flanks. Hansen, however, does not believe that the formation is the problem: it is the manner in which it is being interpreted. We had Vincent Kompany on Match of the Day and we were talking about this. I said, shouldn't the holding midfielders be moving wide to cover? And he said, yeah, but they haven't quite grasped that's what they're meant to do. For me, for that system to work you've got to have two holding players who are not interested in anything other than defending and covering. Like Claude Makélélé. His discipline and positioning were phenomenal. You could argue that Makélélé on his own would do a better job than Chelsea's current holding two. The paradox in this is that Spanish football, from where the new system was borrowed, is renowned for the parsimony of its defending. The Spain national side, for instance, have not conceded a goal in knockout competition since 2006. Across more than 850 minutes against the best attackers in the world, their full-backs have not been found wanting. But then, to exploit the gaps evident when Premier League teams adopt the Spanish approach, opponents need possession. This is the way to make the Spanish system watertight: keep the ball. On Monday at St George's Park, more than 300 coaches working for professional clubs in England were given a clue how to do that. The FA's Licensed Coaches Club had invited Gines Melendez Sotos, the technical director of the Spanish FA, to give a demonstration of his coaching methodology. From a distance the Spanish football revolution seems miraculous. But, as he put a bunch of trainees from Derby County's academy through their paces, Sotos insisted there was a more mundane explanation. Every day, from the age of eight, every player in Spain spends an hour engaging with the exercises he demonstrated, centring on one-touch football played in tight spaces. That is how they learn to keep the ball in matches. That is how they maintain clean sheets. So it is that easy: in order to make the Spanish system watertight, you need to have been training like that from boyhood. Sadly for Ferguson, as a solution, it may be a little too long term to help on Sunday.