25 | Manuel Akanji - 2024/25

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Amazed there’s no comments about him. Mint tonight until the injury.

Back to basics of being a strong defender and no thrills needed elsewhere. Just defend your man and pass the ball. It’s where he excels.

Groin injury, though. Could be out for a while.
I was in the corner to watch his battle with Vinicius - he was superb. Saw him stretch and injure himself in a brilliant tackle, his injury cost us dearly
 
Khusanov, Dias, Ake, Gvardiol
Nunes, Reis, Stones, Lewis

Gonna have to do for the rest of the season. Thank goodness for Nico Gonzalez.
 
Akanji is a massive loss for me. Been poor this season centrally but I’m convinced he’s been playing through injury the whole season and is utterly exhausted. Now the guy has a long term injury. He’s much better at RB as evidenced against Madrid. Now we have Rico and Nunes at RB.

Comes back to terrible squad planning, what were Begiristain and Pep thinking last summer. It almost feels like they were lazy, couldn’t be arsed to coach a new group of players and wanted one last dance with the current group before departing.
 
Khusanov, Dias, Ake, Gvardiol
Nunes, Reis, Stones, Lewis

Gonna have to do for the rest of the season. Thank goodness for Nico Gonzalez.

And once Stones and Ake get injured, we'll have to field something like:

Nunes, Khusanov, Dias and Gvardiol.

If Dias doesn't stay fit, a top 4/5 place will be difficult to get:

Nunes, Khusanov, Gvardiol and Lewis.

That's the stuff of nightmares.
 
Comes back to terrible squad planning, what were Begiristain and Pep thinking last summer. It almost feels like they were lazy, couldn’t be arsed to coach a new group of players and wanted one last dance with the current group before departing.
Don't know how many times it needs mentioning that Pep himself has said Txiki came to him in the summer saying a rebuild was needed, but Pep said he wanted to get one last season out of his trusted squad and said no.
 
contuining to not rotate by involving simpson has cost us. we lost a lot of the games anyway so Pep should have taken his medicine and played the kids.
 
contuining to not rotate by involving simpson has cost us. we lost a lot of the games anyway so Pep should have taken his medicine and played the kids.
Well the only games recently we've lost were Madrid and Arsenal, would Simpson have prevented those ,probably not.
 
Oh no. He's played a lot with injuries. At his fittest he's excellent.
 
contuining to not rotate by involving simpson has cost us. we lost a lot of the games anyway so Pep should have taken his medicine and played the kids.

The kid is good on the ball, but not been impressed at how he's dealt with a few balls I to the box last time I saw him. Got to remember how inexperienced he is and his next real step is probably going out on loan like Doyle, Harwood-Bellis and a few others.
 
And once Stones and Ake get injured, we'll have to field something like:

Nunes, Khusanov, Dias and Gvardiol.

If Dias doesn't stay fit, a top 4/5 place will be difficult to get:

Nunes, Khusanov, Gvardiol and Lewis.

That's the stuff of nightmares.
Imagine that against Madrid or Liverpool
 
Imagine that against Madrid or Liverpool

I worry whether Stones and Ake will be able to survive Newcastle and Real without injuries. Dias has been injury prone this season too. So we might need to field an experimental defence vs Liverpool.

Without having Akanji over the last 2-3 months, during which Stones, Dias and Ake were mostly unavailable, we'd have been midtable now.
 
The management of our Defenders this season has been utterly terrible.

The mistake was to rely on Stones and Ake to stay fit. Their injury problems led to overplaying Dias and Akanji, and thus to further injury problems.

Pep's main problem this season has been relying on favourites who are injury prone or oldish.
 
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