Like everyone else, I hope it’s a blip, but today it felt like a passing.
It exposed Gundo, it showed how old some players were, even though they’ve still got the occasional game in them, and it showed how the “modern approach” to the high speed counterattack…WHICH IS HOW THE REST OF THE WORLD IS PLAYING FOOTBALL NOW…is death to us.
I LITERALLY called for a loss today and even said it would come down our right side and be a cross in behind us. I can’t remember the last time I thought we would lose a game?!
It’s been coming and the injury situation has only exacerbated it. The Spurs game showed how frail we look and Bournemouth no-names went to town on us.
This is structural and strategic, not tactical. Structurally, we have not spent the money on, or the time to cultivate, the players we were clearly going to need to start filling holes that were developing.
You saw them developing, I’m sure, last season, and nothing was done to start addressing those issues. A free Gundo felt like a great little stop gap measure, but he’s currently being asked to be Prime Gundo and he just doesn’t have it in him anymore…and the flashes of it are getting fewer and further in between.
KDB certainly has brilliance in him, but for both club and country, we are seeing it less and less.
Phil Foden clearly has some personal demons/issues he’s trying to get over, because he’s a pale imitation of the POTY we saw last year. He could have won the game today, but his shots were wayward and he needed too many touches at other times.
Kova was always seen as a back up midfielder, yet has become pivotal (no pun intended) to us not being literally over run in every game. I thought he was superb today in a game where we got battered in midfield, so that felt like a big waste!
Bernardo? Love him to death! But, not only did he never have pace, but he’s lost a step, so if you’re a defender you just need to keep him in front of you because he’s going nowhere…yet he’s a WINGER for us, who steps into a second 6 role late in games to shore up the midfield when we take the old, tired fuckers off!
And then we have the likes of Grealish, who divides opinion worse than Trump, but seems to laugh off his own mediocrity. Or Walker, whose domestic woes are only bested by his on field woes, which tells you just how bad his season is going. His contribution to games was always “catch the rabbit that runs in behind” but that’s been laid to rest by multiple players this season, and it is not like his “positional sense” was ever going to get him out of a wet paper bag, let alone a football match where he’s getting toasted. If I see one more push or arse bump or bend when he’s supposed to go up for a ball or ease it out of play, I’ll scream!
So far this season, it’s looking like Gvardiol is our POTY. Think about that and what it says about who we are so far this season…
