Ted Hughes wrote:I was hoping to see real planning & shape like we've never seen before after hearing about how methodical Mancini was. That was very evident in the 1st game as we moved seamlessly through 3 systems & everyone knew their job. I was delighted with it & expected that to continue & improve so we'd have a tight unit for the new players to join, making their integration easier.
Instead, it's become a mess & you can see the players aren't happy, both on the pitch & on the bench, they look tense & in some cases even pissed off. It's not how other club's players look at this stage in comparison. as a unit we're disorganised at the back, toothless up front & passing badly in midfield. This from players, most of whom have played a whole season together.
The US tour has been wasted by too much fucking about & we now need to get back to the kind of planning we saw at the very start of it. We really had an opportunity there to use the time to great effect & gain an advantage. We blew it.
Oh dear, I guess your glass runneth half empty at the moment - makes me glad I only saw the inter game which was a defensive shambles of epic proportions.
How much of that we can attribute to Platt & Kidd I dont know, but I have to admit I am now EXTREMELY worried about our defensive organisation.
The "not played together " card cannot be played for the centre halves Toure & Lescott whom have all had at least 10-15 competetive games as a partnership last year, and were frankly, pale imitations of premier league/international class defensive partnership. Add to that Kompany who covered Toure reasonably well and led the defence in the 2nd half of the season, and I cannot understand why we are still so bad at the back when they have played plenty of games together.
People talk about pre-season as thought players have forgotten how to play football in the intervening period from May. Bullshit that, they all played under Mancini last year and all know what he expects and what the system is - which is why I can't see Mancini's absence against Inter being the problem. Ultimately, whilst the defence was a little better, there were many games where Toure/Kompany's attention span and ability to do the simple things caused us to lose badly (Everton x2, Stoke, etc etc), just as Lescott & Toure did many times under Hughes.
I'm starting to think that unfortunately the conclusion we will draw by xmas is to move Toure and/or Lescott on and start again. Thats not a knee jerk reaction, it is a considered opinion from having seen no real semblance of a defensive partnership form in over a season with those players.
Unfortunately it runs deeper than defence, in that the midfield spectacularly failed to do their job in either an attacking or defensive sense vs Inter, so it would appear that after all this time, still, none of the players have got a clue what their role is.
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