Watched the game and it was unsurprisingly very reminiscent of last season.
Ederson - just would love him to save us a few times with stopping shots you wouldn’t expect. His distribution is great but with our outfield players I would sacrifice a bit of distribution for a shot stopper.
RB - Nunes actually I thought did well, his energy, ability on the ball and runs made a difference in a first half we should have scored 3/4. Akanji came on and it completely made the team lopsided and back to slow plodding football, you can’t have all the creative players on the team and use Akanji like that.
We need 2 rbs who have similar traits so you don’t lose all semblance of style and structure when a change is made.
DM - we were cut open so many times with seemingly one of two balls through our press - ala last season. It does seem crazy you could have more structure and sit Nico next to Rodri or Reijnders and then let the others attack so we aren’t completely open in the middle. Last season showed Gundo and Bernie plus 1 in midfield doesn’t have the legs, so shock horror this was proven again.
Wingers - Doku and Savinho fall into thr flatter to deceive category. Doku was threatening but when he has the square root of fuck all end product it negates that threat. I can’t believe if you put cherki in the positions Doku was in then we wouldn’t have won comfortably. Savinho needs a bit step up, god knows how Oscar Bobb hasn’t had made game time.
Transitions - this could be the real issue. Silva talked about at the end controlling transitions better, I worry if we see more games like this then Pep will revert back to the ultra cautious approach of last year.
Positives, we did for the first half look good, add in a few more killers aka Marmoush, Foden or Cherki and that would have been goodnight Vienna.
We need to really focus on our core players now and keep more of a structure, not so much chopping and changing. Not in big games going for the safe option of the more uncs the better.
The first few games showed what we could do, the lads can have a rest, streamline the squad and hopefully today was a reminder we still need changes.