Officials
Referee: Carlos del Cerro Grande (Spain)
Assistants: Juan Carlos Yuste (Spain) & Roberto Alonso Fernandes (Spain)
Fourth official: Josè Luis Munuera Montero (Spain)
VAR: Alejandro Hernandez (Spain) Assistant VAR: Guillermo Cuadra Fernandez (Spain)
On May 1st 2019 I stepped of a plane from Spain and overheard someone saying that Barcelona had beaten us 3-0 in the Champions League. I was gutted to hear that but I immediately turned around to a friend and said that we would go through. Yes it was a bold statement to make especially when we were playing Barcelona who had Messi on their team. However I was confident that we could do it.
Roll the clock onto now and I am not so confident. I watched Atalanta man mark us and we didn't have an answer. I watched us giving their attackers miles of space when they were attacking. So on one hand they always had a defender within a yard of our players when we got the ball and on the other hand I saw us giving their players 10 yards of space. Scoring when you are tightly marked is very difficult but it's much easier when there's nobody near to you. Give any player 5 yards of space and they will hurt you.
Look at the space we gave each of their goal-scorers.
I don't remember us having that amount of space.
I thought we would have learnt but have just watched a similar match against Palace. They were defending touch-tight but on the goal we conceded we gave them yards of space. Yes we fluffed chance after chance but most of our chances were not as easy as the one that we gifted to them. Look at the space we gave Eze.
People rightly point out the chances that we missed but we also have to look at the way that we turn off and give the opposition so much time and space. I don't think we get the same time on the ball in and around the area.
Palace and Atalanta marked Mac Allister very closely which worked very well as he has been our best player. A lot of our attacks go through him so if you can keep him quiet then that nullifies a lot of our quick attacks. Mark our front players and our midfield and then we resort to aimless long punts from the keeper.
Crimson Tank pointed out in the writeup for the Palace match that football is a simple game. For me it's about marking players , finding space and passing accurately and quickly. Recently we have been doing nothing of the sort. Our passing has been slow, we have hidden and not offered ourselves and our marking has been atrocious at times.
In the space of a week we have drawn a league game against the worst United side that I have seen, lost a home game in the Europa League against a team that came for a draw and lost another league game at home against a team that was just above the relegation zone. The worst part of this was that we were top of the league at the time and also favourites for the Europa League.
You can blame it on injuries or tiredness but the simple truth is that we haven't been nearly good enough when it mattered. We had been very good prior to this week but we've suddenly found winning to be hard.
Ok so I'm being a bit negative but the way that we imploded hurts.......it really does. We have a great manager who has delivered us such great memories but we have just fallen like Devon Loch when the finishing line was in sight.
Ok so we can still win this game but it is going to be hard. We need to take our chances and not gift them any goals. We have turned around ties like this in the past and we do have the players to do so. Get an early goal and then another one in the first half and then suddenly the game looks much different. I expect Atalanta to try man-marking us again and if that doesn't work then they will try the low block. If we regain our confidence then this is still not over. Each of our players needs to win their individual battles and to take responsibility. The tie may look over but it really isn't.
The same applies to the league. It's not over but we need to give ourselves a wobble and turn round our poor form.
Sorry and feel free to tell me that I am being negative...........I normally am positive but the last three games have been awful.
Let's turn this season around and give the boss a proper send off.