YorkshireSquare wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 9:23 am
Do we keep blaming individuals for errors or are our issues more systemic?
The amount of times Koch and Aaronson gave the ball away last night was unforgivable but is Jesse asking the playes to do something they are not capable of or does his system not provide them with the options they need for an out ball? We had most of the ball last night but a large amount of the game, in the furst half particularly was played in our half.
Koch's distribution and general awareness is poor for me, I am not convinced by him at all - I may be on my own here but I would like to see Llorente play instead of Koch and see if he can get back to his best in his natural position on the right of defence.
I think the errors are part player and part system. Under Bielsa we saw that we were vulnerable if we gave the ball away carelessly when flooding forward. I think it was against MU that it was really highlighted (think it was in Prem S1) as we flooded forward, misplaced a pass in midfield and MU broke and scored very early on in the game. It was like MU had laid a trap (credit to OGS for that) and we fell into it. So a bit comes down to players as if the pass is accurate the ball is kept - note Man City beating a very good press that we did against them once the other week when they were able to one touch it out of defence and every player had options. Because City play like that every match they are used to it and regularly do it with ease. Because we are still in a bit of a limbo state between the MB and JM tactics we are extremely vulnerable to giving the ball away as players aren't on the same wavelength and as such last night Aaronsen played the ball back to Roca who wasn't expecting it (as usually it is knocked long). Similarly last week Cooper plays to Koch who wasn't really expecting it and wasn't aware of what was around him - if Koch is alert he comes to meet the ball and knows where to pass it before he gets to it.
I made the point that we played our best football last night (last 25 minutes +) when we had 6 championship players on the pitch (and 8 or 9 players that had been with Bielsa from day 1 of the premier league). Was this because we had players that wanted to pass, wanted to move and wanted to get into positions and knew had to play decent football - did the players actually revert to playing the Bielsa way instead of the JM way? Was that why JM was so angry in the press conference?
At the end of the match last night only Adams was on the pitch that hadn't been at the club since we started our first match back in the premier league 2 1/2 seasons ago.
For me we looked so much more comfortable with Ayling on the right, sure the end product at times from Ayling was poor (and Rasmus probably is better with the final ball) but the linking up and intelligence was much better. Harrison looked lively when he came on, was this helped by the fact that when he came on the only non-Bielsa players on the pitch were Adams and Gnonto? Klich looked good, coming on at the same time as Harrison.
