Rodrigo Bentancur

[papaspur]

Yeah my frustration with him is that he does seem to have the ability to play more progressively, but chooses to take the safe option too much.

On the flip side I personally think he is fantastic defensively - better than I thought when he first joined. To me he seems like a true no.6 at the moment.

Right, I think there was one moment where he made a back-pass to VDV iirc, but he turned with the ball before the pass since passing back to Romero was not the best option. So it's not a brainless safety pass; however, there does need to be some more nous or guile, or maybe it's a matter of conviction. If our midfield isn't playing in a settled manner, that throws the entire team dynamic off-balance and makes us seem more nervy.

 

[elltrev]

When he first joined I noticed that a lot of his defensive capability came from shutting down space using his extreme pace. He was paired with Hojbjerg and we all knew Pierre had no recovery pace. Then Bents got injured and has never recovered that express pace. Now he has to rely on different attributes to be as defensively secure. However the problems seems to be that he doesn't want to over-expose himself going forward as his smarts are saying he won't get goal side like he used to. If you look closely, Bergval doesn't have this same fear. Like Sarr, they just play more with their hearts.

The interesting combination is with Palhinha because Bents needs to unshackle himself and be more like Sarr and Bergval to make that combo work.

That’s so interesting, I’ve been thinking that recently he looks faster than I’ve ever noticed before!