I see some people complain our poor attacking football this season is down to a poor squad. It may not be a top 4 squad, but it is a squad that is capable of playing much better football than this. Look at Sunderland ffs! They're ripping it up with a much inferior squad to our's. Won at Chelsea, drew at Arse.
I don't know why Frank persist with this brick style of play when it gets us nothing. It's baffling to expect more from the players when they're set up to fail every game.
We have zero energy in the midfield. Palhinha and Bentancur now just sit and protect the defence. They don’t press quickly, they don’t surge forwards. They sit. Whether that’s down to instruction on physical limitation is debatable.
We can afford one player to sit, to shield, we can’t afford a static midfield. We need our own version of Caicedo. One that won’t be as good as, for what it’s worth, I think that Caicedo is the best midfielder in the league especially at what he does. But we need that type of player. We don’t have one.
So then the question is, what do we do about it? And yesterday we played a two man static midfield against an Arsenal three man midfield and so were consequently second to everything and giving up too much space.
We needed a three man midfield. We needed to have Bergvall instead of Bentancur but I assume that he was unfit. I have been defending Bentancur a lot as I know how good he was, but perhaps it’s time to realise that that same Bentancur no longer exists consistently after his injury. Bergvall can at least carry the ball. But if he was unfit to return then who else was there?
I like Sarr but so often he appears a Jack of All Trades rather than to have specific skill set. He’s a decent player but he needs to be supported and developed to become great at something.
So we lack that big midfielder with energy, that is a defensive powerhouse and can press all day. So we definitely can’t get away with a two man midfield in a match like yesterday. So playing a back 5 in which Romero didn’t move forwards to pass often enough, VDV wasn’t able to take chances to surge forward and Danso who seems to be a last man standing, get it out of the box defender rather than anything else, was limited.
We are missing pieces, not only the above but we also have those players that we have set up incorrectly and we don’t use our players to the best of what they can do. They also aren’t fired up, and yes some of that should be the player, but the manager also has to be responsible. And it is in those areas that Thomas Frank failed yesterday.
We need a new midfielder. We need a left winger and we need a striker. Three big pieces of the puzzle. But let’s not pretend that all of the other pieces are perfectly aligned in the way that they ought to be.
