As soon as he got the ball and was shaping to shoot I thought no , please!, he’s shown no evidence of having a shot ability like most central defenders or many full backs - the technique and power is rare in them . You can see him shaping for it in desperation for a goal so I can see why he tried .
I remember when he first came he hit a quite impressive low, very hard shot at one point. Maybe in that Fulham FA Cup game when he started and impressed. I remember being a bit surprised by it. He also said something this summer when talking about the way Walter wanted to use him this year which was along the lines of getting forward more and using his ball-striking ability, which seemed to me to suggest that he and the management see it as a strength of his. But certainly, that one on Saturday was crap.
All pros are capable of striking a ball exceptionally well But also capable of not connecting cleanly, you can take dozens of shots in training without pressure But you might only get one chance in a game
Post-match Norwich player said a similar thing about how we overcommit and how they'd analysed and targeted that. Makes you wonder how Tim got away with it in Germany for so long and can we really expect other teams not to do the same?
I’m not sure this is true in all cases. Most can in an easy environment but think of people like Oscar he would never get good connections with the ball despite scoring a fair amount. Versus Delap who’s strike the ball incredibly well everytime but shot placement sometimes let him down
Also noticed Tim didn't shake hands with their coach after the game. Not cool. Maybe the pressure's getting to him.
We're still in the process of players learning his way of playing to be fair though, and still have players gelling over time. Even now we've still barely seen Puerta, Alzate, Hughes, Pedro and not that much more of others either. It's a pretty steep learning curve this season and I'm personally still seeing signs of improvement. As we cut mistakes out of our game and become more well drilled at the system I think (or at least hope) we'll see more benefits than pitfalls.
Sorry I'm not buying this 'give the players time to learn his methods' any more. He's had a full pre-season and we're almost a quarter of the way through the season. How long does he need? Yes he's got a few players who haven't played much but the core of team have had plenty of time to get to grips with it. If not, it's either overcomplicated or just plain ineffective. Or both.
He's had had full pre season, but a fair amount of the players haven't had a full pre season and almost a quarter. Saturday was a big improvement over Norwich and if we continue to improve at the same rate then we will have zero issues
That's a pretty low base line. Yes we improved but yet again succumbed to the same issues in the types of goal we concede and, again, struggled to get a shot on target. Lost at home. Again. There's no guarantee that we'll improve, in fact there's a distinct possibility that other teams now know exactly how to play against us. Can we say the same about our game plan towards them? And if the plan is simply to outscore the opposition then we need a far more clinical forward line than the one we have.
Sunderland are top of the league and we massively restricted them. Most of signings we brought in did not have a full pre season. I expected it to take longer for things to start to click, yet to be fair we've had an alright start overall. It takes time, not single digits games to start looking the part when we have had a massive turnover in players and a new manager with a different style. All players whether new or here last season are having to change how they play and adapt and learn to play together etc...
