Hull City are aiming to make the perfect start to the Shota Arveladze era when they welcome Swansea City to the MKM Stadium on Saturday afternoon.
Arveladze’s arrival at the club follows the departure of previous manager Grant McCann a few days ago and the Georgian will be keen to pick up a positive result in his opening game as City manager.
Having been linked with joining City since early November, Arveladze will have familiarised himself with the vast majority of the players and how the team have played in the last couple of months. Moreover, he’s been specifically brought to the club by Acun Ilicali with the purpose of overseeing a new project and will undoubtedly need time to adapt to the Championship.
It’ll definitely be interesting to see how City approach the game tactically and whether Arveladze sticks with the 3-5-2 formation which has proven to be rather successful of late. He’ll obviously bring his own individual methods and ideas to the table, but it’s all about how he manages to get this across to the players and whether they can adjust to what will be asked of them. With the financial backing of Ilicali, Arveladze will be able to bring his own players into the club to help implement his style of play onto the squad as a whole.
Swansea sit in 17th place in the Championship table and are two places above the Tigers. However, the Swans have three games in hand on some of the sides above them having only played 25 games so far this season. Russell Martin’s side are unbeaten in their last three league games and have picked up two successive clean sheets against Preston North End and Queens Park Rangers respectively. Therefore, this indicates how solid the Swans are defensively.
Martin has deployed a possession based system involving playing out from the back. This allows the opportunity to press from the front and put the Swansea defenders under intense pressure. This would leave them more prone to playing loose passes and provide potential opportunities to create clear goalscoring chances. That’s always the risk with utilising this type of tactic, but it looks good when it pays off.
At the other end of the pitch, Swansea’s biggest goal threat is Joël Piroe. The Dutch forward has 17 goal involvements (13 goals and four assists) and has been very impressive in his debut season for the club. Meanwhile, Jamie Paterson would have been another danger for the City defence having got a tally of eight goals and four assists to his name. However, Paterson hasn’t been involved in Swansea’s plans of late owing to a contract dispute with the club hierarchy.
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