Amongst my disappointment, I know full well these players have not become useless overnight. Neither has Jürgen.
We’ve had a brutal run of injuries requiring lots of personnel changes. We have rebuilt the midfield, and much of the attack. We’ve gone quite deep in four competitions (against expectations) and had barely any time in this second half of the season to train a different approach, and my own opinion has long been that we’ve needed something different than the inverted full back approach, as our defence has been very vulnerable all season.
I don’t know why the manager and coaching staff have seemingly abandoned the high tempo, hard pressing game (perhaps because of the injuries and tiredness?) but to my recollection, we looked our best when we played that way. I don’t know why we seemingly chose the very slow play out from the back/ hoof it tactics in both Atalanta games. I can only surmise why we have recently misplaced the ability to pass quickly, accurately and progressively (with so many changes and lack of training time, it seems to me that a lot of our players are not quite on the same wavelength - seen today with progressive passes going into space that no one was attacking).
I’m fairly old school and consider getting a solid defence in order is the most important focus. I simply don’t believe that risking going behind first every game is sensible, as it must be catastrophically hard on the players’ mentality. If one risks that for heavy metal pressing and high risk attacking, fair enough, but I think we’ve allowed opposition to believe that they will always score, and our possession game has failed too often (which may be understandable given our youth and new midfield) resulting in brutal goals.
If Jürgen was staying, I believe he would fix things in preseason as he has done before. I can’t blame him for not finding the energy now - he has told us he is close to burn out. The future is still very bright for me, and these players will be making our complaints now look foolish by Christmas.
