As confirmed in another post on here, Darko Milanic, recent coach/manager/blokey-in-charge of Austrian Bundesliga side SK Sturm Graz has signed to be the next Leeds United coach/manager/blokey-in-charge . My post isn’t going to impinge on that one but I would like to ask one simple question, what will he bring besides his toothbrush and toiletry bag?

I have briefly written elsewhere on his management stats and performance. He brings pretty decent headline figures of a shade over 50% wins (50.40%) and 24% losses which means that us Leeds fans can expect to be sad/miserable/upset/despondent [delete as necessary]  only around 1/4 of the time or around 11.5 games per season and we’ve got 3 of those out of the way with the Millwall, Watford and Brighton games. One thing I noticed when putting that article together was his preferred playing formation was the ‘4-4-2 double six‘. I’ll be honest with you, my only experience of a ‘double six’ was rolling one to get out of jail in Monopoly so I had to have a nosey into that one. Put quite basically it is a 4-4-2 formation but with two holding central midfield players and two others employed as either standard left/right midfield players or pushed up in a more attacking midfield role.

The ‘4-4-2 double six’ seems ideally placed to offer the centre backs both an additional layer of protection and also it allows teams to defend against the gaps that appear behind a traditional midfield and in front of the defensive four. Could this be what Milanic employs as his ‘go-to’ formation? Will Rodolph ‘RA4’ Austin and Lewis Cook be his preferred ‘holding midfield’ twins?

4-4-2 double six

This is how the Leeds team would have looked (right) yesterday lining up before the dismantling of Huddersfield had Milanic been the coach and if the 4-4-2 double six been used. If he were to use this then the ready-made defensive ‘holder’ in RA4 and in Lewis Cook we have a more natural passing ‘holder’ should things need to be altered or phases of play dictate changes; think of a Championship version of Schweinsteiger and Khedira in the 2010 World Cup. In fact, German coach Joachim Löw exploited the fact that England didn’t play a ‘holding screen’ if front of their back four saying “We knew that Gerrard and Lampard always support the forwards and that the midfield would be open, there would be spaces.”

Until he turns up and his first team roll out of the tunnel and line up – who knows what he will do and how the team will play.

I mean, it’s Leeds United, why would we expect anything to be straightforward?