Lloris
Aurier Alderweireld Dier Reguilon
Hojbjerg Ndombele
Bergwijn Lamela Son
Kane
Our first 45 yesterday should have resulted in at least 4 or 5 goals. Reguilon, Son, Kane and Hojbjerg all missed sitters. The problem was that 45 minutes of decent football was followed by 45 minutes of no football whatsoever. I don’t mind playing on the break. That’s fine. What we do is simply stop playing and wait for the game to end. Nobody decent plays like that. Not at home to Fulham.
Before we kicked off Man City scraped a 1-0 against Brighton in a similar match to ours but they played football for 90 minutes. They didn’t just stop once they got to half time. They didn’t play heavy metal football but they looked dangerous for 90 minutes and kept a good clean sheet. We only seem capable of playing 20-45 minutes of actual football in each match. You can’t win matches doing that when you are as wasteful as we are in front of goal. It puts too much pressure on our sloppy defenders to keep a clean sheet. No matter who we play we seem to let them have 65% of the ball in the second 45 which is not acceptable.
Even with his bizarre selection of 4 midfielders yesterday, if we’d just kept doing what we did in the first half we would have won by 3 or 4. They were looking dodgy as hell at the back. But as usual, the opponent came out with more energy and we got scared and disappeared from the game. On Sunday we need a good 90 minutes. This game on Sunday is going to be extremely hard, they just won their first game of the season and they will be reminiscing over how they easily bitchslapped us last year. If keep doing what we’ve been doing then we are going to drop points again.