With all the talk about Frank Rijkaard going on, I felt it might be appropriate to bump this thread.
Some information about his philosophy and set-up.
DISCLAIMER:This information is pretty much solely based on what he's done in the past. Similar to Hodgson in the sense that any team you put in front of Rijkaard he will try and turn them into something similar to this. If he was in charge on Wolves/Stoke/Blackburn, he'd try to get them to play like this (and ultimately fail) so don't be too alarmed he's not doing the best at Galatasaray (board sold A LOT of players and the ones he does have at his disposal aren't entirely made for this type of a system) or Sparta Rotterdam. He has done well at Holland and Barcelona. I think if he's backed in the transfer market, he can make this work. I doubt his ability to make us amazing, but certainly a top 4 team again and while looking good.
Preferred formation is a 4-3-3. The 3 mids play quite narrow and are often encouraged to drift wide in order to find space while the the the front 3 actually play quite wide and are encouraged to cut inside. You'll notice these happening in tandem a lot as illustrated by this diagram:
Player 7 is dribbling the ball towards the wing, player 10 has realised this and is subsequently moving towards the goalmouth. You will see this happen a lot, get used to it. This plays into the strengths of a few of our players, namely Kuyt, Babel and Jovanovic.
Teams are setup quite aggressively and attack-minded so while we'll see a lot of goals, we'll also let in more. Highly disciplined teams will be a bother. Expect the left forward and the right forward (players 10 and 11 in the diagram) to drop back into midfield and act as a first line of defence (think they'll press for the ball back and close down hard but once the ball reaches the midfield area, it's almost out of their jurisdiction so they will rarely backtrack but instead prefer to keep themselves open for the counter-attack).
5 man midfields have the potential to overrun us something fierce, so expect one of the wide forwards (probably Kuyt) to help in midfield, should the need arise but there's not a huge chance of us actually retracting both to form our own five man midfield. This system is easy on the eyes and setup to attack at any given opportunity. We will concede a lot but I cannot envisage us being any worse than we currently are. This system is similar to Arsenal's in a sense, it will look good, we'll tw*t the little teams and occasionally let a small team snatch a draw/win because of indiscipline. It is not a philosophy/formation/setup that will catapult us to the next level but it's certainly more than capable of playing at high levels of football, just not at the absolute top tiers (obviously if we get stunning personnel, it is possible).
A high defensive line is on the menu and the 3 midfielders (or 2 at the very least) are almost given a free role to do as they please, it's very possible that one might tuck in but not play the role of an outright defensive midfielder. Pace is paramount to this system (it involves A LOT of running onto through balls) and I think any players who aren't the quickest will probably be gone sans one or two.
edit: There will be less possession than we were used to under Rafa, expect 50/50 splits even against the small teams, the tempo will more than likely be quite high which will result in a lot of the ball being given away while we're frantically trying to attack at all costs. If anyone's got questions about his methods, I have watched a fair few of his games - I'll help as best as I can.
