Last night was deeply worrying. It's hard to think of a single player who put in a performance anything like what has become their norm and as a team their display took us back to some of the worst nights of the pre-Pep age. We had been playing about 10 minutes and I was already eerily reminded of the home leg of the League cup semi-final against Liverpool in late-2011, when we surrendered without a whimper. Last night was generally pass-and-don't-move, pass for the sake of it, stand still, don't run into space, jog-don't-run. Where was the energy, the dynamism, the intensity which was so evident last season - all those qualities that we thought Pep had made second nature to the players? The players ought to be ashamed if it was simply Pep's absence from the dressing room and dugout that led to such a drop off in their performance levels but at least we would know it won't happen again. At his introduction to us in 2016 Pep was asked to tell us about parts of his job with the players and he told us that one of them was "to kick their arses sometimes". I suspect that will be the start of the first post match training session.
