Correct. It looks like Marseille may now be the threat for top of the group (and we play them away in the final group stage round ) .
Passmap time please log in to view this image Weirdly, this looks similar to a lot of our maps from last season, especially with the Kane/Son pairing's positioning and the traffic from Kane to Son that comes from it, as well as the triangles between the back three and the pivot On the subject of the pivot, their positioning also says how we were set up, given how deep they're sitting, although Hojbjerg’s positioning seems to be affected by the formation change when Skipp & Bissouma came on And, of course, this is Exhinit Q in The Case of Son &Perisic Not Being Able to Play in the Same Team...
Sporting will have three players suspended when we play them Well that guarantees their defence will be early 90s Milan...
Just a couple of odd observations from the game. Romero broke the advertising hoarding when he was shoved into it and it caught fire. Rather delayed reaction in dealing with it and it stunk the place out. Their number 22, Timothy Chandler, had an ongoing row with a coach on the sidelines. About four of them spent ages running up and down and then Tuta got sent off. He was furious, either about getting sent on or not. I assume the latter, as he wasn't used.
I think it's two players. Adan's red v Marseille was for a handball denying a goalscoring opportunity.
The frustrating thing is that we have the final third of last season as the benchmark of what this squad can do, without even considering the summer signings. With the fixture compression of this season, I am fearful that Conte dogma will run key players into the ground (attack in particular) , and then you really will see the likes of Jose/Nuno ball.
Depends on what the red is for, especially in Europe, for some reason. Violent conduct or serious foul play are 3, virtually everything else is 1. A straight red for ****ing off the ref particularly offensively is 2, though. Adan's was for handling outside the box and preventing a goal scoring opportunity. That should be one.
I think Conte rotates a plenty in order to avoid burnout as much as he can considering the level of our squad depth. We lost Kulu…Richy started and our bench looked **** for attacking options…so one injury and we scraping barrels…as much as we have strengthened squad depth quality over the Summer we are no way littered with the right quality in every position yet. Every game for us has meaning because regardless of what the fans think i.e a good cup run and scrape top 4 will do Conte aspires to a lot more so every game has a consequence come the business end of the season so with that in mind, Conte will pick his best players most games. Hard to bench for example Perisic when your options are what they are. However he’s still done it because I guess he thinks a player in his 30’s needs it. He’s not daft
The way we play would look magic if our attackers could take a higher percentage of their chances. Then we could laud how Conte ball splits defences because I saw us create chance after chance to get onto goal but decision making for the killer ball more times than not let’s us down be it poor off ball movement or poor execution of the assist ball. Conte ball creates lots of chances and with a front 3 of our quality and pedigree we should be scoring much more.
Yeah this is why I’m critical of the lack of squad rotation too. The players can cope with it atm but it’s going to be a long season with more injuries than usual post World Cup I fear. For all the signings made, Spurs are still only 2-3 injuries away from being in trouble
To be fair we lost Kulu at a time where Lucas was also out so it was more two injuries than one. Any team that loses two players in the same position will likely then be threadbare in the role. I don’t think Conte’s rotated well at all though to be honest, especially given the size of our squad now. There’s a number of players being ran into the ground whilst others are feeding off scraps, despite the quality levels not being too dissimilar in some starters and some on the bench, in fact at RWB the poorer player keeps starting which confuses and annoys the **** out of me. He’s also barely utilised all 5 available subs in about 80% of games and a number of his subs have come on at 80+ minutes, giving little time for the sub to impress/ impact and barely any time for the starting player to have genuine rest. Despite some shoddy performances we’ve had a really good start to the season in terms of points as well as sitting in a good position now in the CL but I fear by the time the business end of the season is here we’re gonna be absolutely cooked, especially with the WC in between it all. It’s a dangerous game he’s playing.
it is risky because the likelihood of injuries to key players increases since they are playing so much I hope Paratici got a few more Juve rejects lined up for the January window to help us come the business end
I think the 5 subs thing is tricky. We saw last night that even 2 goals up with against 10 men, the team looked dissonant with so many changes. With key squad players like Skipp and Lucas still coming back up to speed we’re still not in a position where we can slot players in during a game and they just click in. Especially when we change systems in the process. The big problem positions for rotation seem to be CCB (Dier), the CMs, and RWB. The RWB one is partly down to Conte’s attitude towards Spence, justified or not we don’t know. Hopefully the latter two will be better now we have alternatives coming back to fitness and we appear to be using an alternative midfield structure more often. But Dier is a tricky man to switch out because there’s no natural replacement.
To continue from my post last night: Cons: Kane taking free-kicks, missing a penalty and failing to give Gil a tap-in. Sloppy start, awful substitutions that made no sense and going to sleep after their red. Running some players into the ground. Carlos del Cerro Grande. Charles of Closed Big? Makes no sense, like most of his decisions. It sounds odd to be slagging him off after a win where he gave us two penalties and sent off their player. He was ****ing awful, though. They should've genuinely been down to about 7 players. Lots of shocking tackles, Hasebe should definitely have gone and the Gil pen was a red, too. No excuse for the pathetic way that we saw out the game, but I don't want to see that ref again.
I still think Lenglet was brought in to play both both LCB and CCB, depending on what's required (aka who's injured) since he has the passing to perform in the central role In terms of RWB, since those definitely not racist theories from Chelsea Twitter about Spence were put to bed by his inclusion in last night's squad, the real question is why Conte doesn't trust Doherty. Admittedly the collective amnesia our fanbase has for wanting him offloaded as recently as January is grossly overrating Doherty's brief spell of replicating his Wolves form, but it does suggest that Conte thinks that Doherty has (for lack of a better word) a weakness that keeps him out of the team, with the obvious suggestion being whether Doherty is 100% after his injury yet
I think Conte has said that Doherty took a long time to fully recover from his injury, no? I don’t think there’s a lack of trust there, more just being careful with a player who by all accounts had a difficult injury and recovery. On the CBs, it’s obviously either Romero central with Sanchez outside, or Lenglet central with Davies outside. Both bring questions. Neither are as dominant in the air as Dier. Romero isn’t likely as good a communicator. Lenglet had serious questions asked of him at Barca and while he’s more physical than Davies I think the outside CB role suits him more as those questions came up when he was in more central positions in a back 4. He’s probably the pick for the Dier backup though. Better there than Sanchez or Japh, neither of whom have the presence of mind or technical security for it.
