No I’m not making excuses.
I’m explaining the extra context that people missed when people made their judgments of his first season. Im doing it so that people still hold some further patience in their locker for this season because there will be times this season as well when fans hopefully don’t throw their toys out the pram whilst the project is still developing.
Especially considering the type of support the club have offered for transfers so far and average age of our squad.
What context?
People appreciate he wanted to ingrain his system.
Been pretty patient tbf.
Ange was the one who came out and said he didn't need to fix set-pieces
Yes, he did end up addressing it, but it looks like we've reverted to disorganisation again when we should have consolidated.
Looks like he went hybrid zonal/man for some reason, when he appeared to go pretty much man-for-man near end of season.
It's not hard for fans to see what's going on.
There's no wizardry at play.
Ange plays high-risk football, heavily attack weighted and relies on speedy scramble recovery to prevent the oppo scoring.
Ange had gathered enough info throughout a whole season to come to pre-season and show he's ON IT.
Again, go catch one of Liverpool's pre-season games and the tactical work slot has done in such a short period of time.
"Fitness" is what teams with super ingrained, solid, properly established, functioning systems might be about in pre-season.
Effectively addressing tactical failure is we've been in need of.
You don't focus only on fitness and park that up until the first day of the season and then see if your tweaks might work.
What are we even doing here???