by CountryRoyal »
15 Sep 2022 11:47
Can someone who understands football better than I do enlighten me why we don’t try and play like we did when we had our biggest, most dominant and most comprehensive win?
I get with a small squad you probably don’t have the fitness levels to consistently play at such a high intensity - but there has to be some compromise, some half-way house. Against Blackburn we pressed and harried high up the pitch and it saw results. Ever since we’ve decided to completely surrender possession from the start, only engage them in our half and increasingly deeper and deeper. When you invite pressure you open your up to mistakes and you have to be on your A game.
I understand we have Joao who obviously isn’t known for pressing, but if he doesn’t score he’s generally useless. He couldn’t hold up a hanky, but it isn’t just him. The whole team is just sitting back more and it looks at times like Tince is the only one trying to push up.
We need to play more on the front foot and engage them in their own half. I thought Sunderland played well, in truth they looked like a team playing right on the edge of their abilities (a lot of their touches and flicks on another day would have been harmless, instead they were perfect, equally they seemed to get the rub of the green and the bounce of the ball), but they deserved that because of the effort and the desire they put in. They’re a League One team and we genuinely made them look like one of the Top 4 of the prem, the gulf was huge all over the park and that is unacceptable.
Paul Ince says he wants his team to play on the front foot, then he needs to work out how to do that because we haven’t played on the front foot for a month.