As much as people hate Pep ball he's always got the best out of his attackers as long as they have goalscoring and creative instincts. The players they have now apart from Haaland are just not elite anymore.
I take it as a positive of Pep ball that all players are now expected to be comfortable on the ball and be able to “play”. When we’re paying good money to watch, it surely should be a minimum requirement.
Said this a few times. As a country we are churning out coaches who go through the same badges and it’s evident in every warm up you ever see. Carbon copy. The only thing that makes it different is having players with better ability. So when someone like Pep, Valarian Ismael come in with something new it is truly ground breaking. From a tactical point of view it’s a brilliant idea if you can pull it off. If I was a coach of a smaller club I’d be looking to do something totally different.
He’d do crap with a rubbish team 100%. But what he’s proven to be great at finding ways to getting the best out of his brilliant players over a sustained period of time due to how innovative he is with tactics. He gets the best out of the best consistently.But you have to remember he had so many doubters when he came to the prem, even with a load of money behind him saying it’s a different kind of challenge doing it in England. He kept to his principles but has always evolved over the years and found solutions. The problem you could blame him for recently is failing to prioritise players who could get goals apart from haaland.
Where's S.M, our BBS's resident Citeh fan with his words of wisdom? Not heard a peep from him since the season started and they've already lost two from three played.
On about Ismael, was watching the Weeds game yesterday and Carragher was on about the kick off straight down field into touch, saying PSG and all the top teams are doing it now. We were doing it 5 years ago.
He created a system of possession because he realised that this minimises goal scoring chances against you but increases goal scoring chances for you. But his system now seems to have evolved into just keeping possession for the sake of it, not to create goalscoring chances. And tactics have evolved such that the teams can now counter City tactics and beat them. SO he needs to evolve, but he seems to be stuck.
If it was just about money, Chelsea & Manchester united would not have been absolutely dogshit over the past 5 & 10 years!
He's never had a challenge before so never needed to evolve. Manager at Barcelona and Bayern Munich (best teams in their leagues then, Darrell Clarke could have won a title there) and Man City (other managers had already done the hard work building them up to title winners)
With the number of legal challenges they're going to put forward, I'd be surprised if it gets concluded this decade. Or even this century.