My takes from the game.
Atmosphere was not bad at all considering 12.30 kick off time and it was relatively early in the season.
Good points
Akanji - more than adequate in the role (call it a moving pivot or a fulcrum) given to him by Pep. I am actually surprised his fearlessness to do it. Still defensively very sound.
Aké - our best one-on-one defender, but very good in the attack as well. I just don't get how Pep manages to get defenders playing that way.
Doku - did everything right to the point of the last touch or pass
Bernardo - the best EPL player right now in what he gives to the team. The warm and cozy duvet for cold winter nights.
Haaland - scored another goal from the position from which we usually miss them
Pep played the right tactics with literally the only 11 available, not many issues with their counter attacks, Salah was kept quiet and their attempt with 4-2-4 press at times caused us no worries.
Bad points
Rodri - played annoyingly safe the whole game, looked at times almost like Pep picked Dias to play in his position. He actually made me fuming how safe he played, I suppose it was Peps instruction, but it was no Rodri of the last three seasons.
Foden - I was excited after his two England games and he literally did nothing apart from that one horizontal run when Alisson proved why he was WC shot-stopper. He is not a winger, he is definitely not an inverted one and he starts suffering from being turned into the jack of all trades.
Doku - see under the good points, until the moment he would turn into Raheem at his worst.
Alvarez - he was just bad at everything he did
The team - I am not sure at what point we are right now, but we are nowhere near among the best clubs in Europe, or in the world, going in the game of this importance with that bench. It was bare bones, although even some bones were missing.
Tactically we are nowhere near Pep's teams of the last 6 seasons, our general stats are very similar to the past seasons apart from our ball possession (which translates in number of passes) went down 4-5%. The number might not be significant for other teams, bit it somehow means the significant loss of game control and management for us, parameters on which we built our success.
And what is with our second halves, in many games this season we looked like tam of impostors coming on after the first 45 minutes. It took us good 15 minutes yesterday to get going and luckily L. were not at it.
