Players coming and going aside, this is the exact same pre season stuff we saw under Rosenior.
Players that have confidence in their ability to beat a man (Giles, Omur, Drameh) try to do so and aren’t afraid to fail. Those that don’t (Jacob, Jones, Slater) invariably end up going backward because they’re afraid to lose the ball and be at fault. We need 11 of the former by August 31st and ideally at least the majority of the squad on opening day needs to be of that quality. Don’t get me wrong, I think Slater is great but he doesn’t always seem to back himself when he is faced up and he invariably turns backwards when he gets the ball.
It’s not that the players we have would be in a relegation scrap, but the system that the manager wants to play demands that our players need to be of a certain quality. We can’t plug in the players we have into this system and expect it to work. If we just played 4231 we’d be towards the bottom of the middle pack. Acun has brought in a manager who plays a very unique system and that requires very specific players. It’s now obvious why TW has turned down so many signings and it perhaps shows up Acun’s expectation because he thinks anybody he signs could just play it. It’s certainly not as simple as “he’s a left winger, so he’ll suit us if we just plonk him on the left.” No, they have to have a very specific playing style that suits our system because if it doesn’t, it quickly goes to ****.
Tonight Giles had to nag at Jacob because the latter kept halting his runs and not overlapping, with the ball just turning over. Drameh and Omur didn’t have that problem, they already look like they compliment each other well.
Simons seems more confident, but that ball rarely made it to our central midfielders, at times it looked like 5-0-5 with how wide our midfield was, and we still got done down the left multiple times.
I trust the club to bring in the players that best suit this system because I firmly believe that if we master it, it’ll be difficult for most Championship teams to stop, given that they’ll lack the technical ability and wherewithal to analyse it properly.