Today was just our fourth game of pre-season. It’s the equivalent of the Chelsea pre-season game last year in Ohio the week before the Community Shield.
Only thing is, it’s the third game of the PL season!
Maybe we should have organised a couple of friendlies in the last two midweeks to get more match fitness in these lads’ legs? because look massively undercooked! We’ve struggled to do anything in the second half of both the last two games because fitness is nowhere fucking near ready for a PL season.
As well as that, we also need to be much more patient and realistic with this team we’ve got now. It’s a squad that’s been assembled quickly in large numbers between January and this Summer. I’ve never seen a football team do well after signing so many players in such a short space of time, ever before. So, why are people expecting it to happen with us now?
It’s a young, inexperienced team with a huge drop in quality from what we were used to seeing from 2017-2024. Elite players have taken time to settle under Pep’s tactics, never mind young lads who’ve never challenged for titles before.
We have to look at us now as a team that’s building for the 2027-28 season, much like in 2009 we were building for the 2011-12 season. That’s where we are. We are in a complete rebuild. With Ederson Stones Aké Akanji Kovačić Gündoğan and BSilva all likely not going to be here by next Summer, it will leave us with no more than half a dozen players in the entire squad who’ve won anything with us. This time next year will be much the same as now because more young, inexperienced players like Reis Bah Nypan and Ecehverri (plus maybe a few more signings) come back to replace those I’ve just mentioned who’s time is nearly up, to keep this full rebuild going.
In the meantime we need to stop with the unrealistic demands that this team need to be playing well together already, playing at a standard most of them have never played at before in their careers as soon as they pull on our shirt, or any notions of madness some might have that these lads should be playing at the standard of prime DSilva and De Bruyne and winning the PL+CL.
It’s like we have comic book expectations of them with no consideration or understanding of the inexperience and newness of this squad.
Time to show what we’re worth as a set of fans and get behind this team like we did the 2009-10 and 2010-11 teams where we had a much more grounded expectations of the team from that era. I think of those as ‘the Poznań years’, they were fun and exciting. We should be enjoying all this, not fucking seeing our arses because we’re not going to get 90 points in the PL or have a trip to Budapest in the CL. These young lads need us to get behind them, and we aren’t doing that.