In fairness, if the manager picks a player who didn't touch the ball for 21 minutes last time he played against the same opposition, just a month earlier, you'd have to say he's not entirely blameless when - to the surprise of absolutely nobody - the same thing happens again, wouldn't you?
The loss wasn't Ancelotti's fault, but I think everyone's assuming that the players are critiquing his tactical acumen, when the likelihood is that it was more a case of saying that they struggled to implement his tactical plan. People are saying he wouldn't have asked them to keep passing about at the back. No, he wouldn't, it's clear that he didn't in fact, because he kept telling them to get it forward quicker. The issue is that the midfield were no good at making themselves available to the defenders, so they kept passing it among eachother, and then either losing it or panicking and launching it. It's fair to say that our tactical plan didn't work in that second half, because while we were evidently aiming to pass the ball out and move them round, we weren't capable of doing it, and it was clear that we weren't capable of doing it after about 5 minutes.
Same with this. It kept coming back because hitting it long wasn't the tactic. The midfield were dropping deep because the tactic was to get them on the ball. We were launching it because we couldn't find passes to them, but they were still deep, so the ball came back because there was nobody up there. What people are advocating is changing the tactical plan, so that the team was actually set up to play the long ball. This would mean that the midfielders were higher up the pitch looking for the second ball, and would (well should) mean that the ball didn't come back as much.
