To be fair to Captain fantastic and a fair few others, a great many of our issues were created by our trying to go tappy crappy, overplaying needlessly and trying to open teams up by 'picking the lock' rather than smashing their door down with a sledge hammer, we don't have the players, especially not in midfield to 'pick the lock' but we do have the players who have been devastatingly effective at smashing down the door with a sledgehammer
I have a degree/form of autism, I am very quick to see patterns of play and automation and equally as quick to see when those things change and whether they're good or bad, I don't like those things changing by my nature and I'll often point them out immediately, then 4-8 weeks later everyone else will be talking about the issues those changes created rather than the source of those issues.
I asked whether or not Hendo was carrying a thigh issue or he had been asked to stop playing the switches, centre to left and right and attempted balls over the top to either play Mane in particular in or for us to break down stubborn defences by winning the second ball from them and quickly forming another entirely unpredictable and impossible to read phase of attack from there as soon as he stopped playing those passes and we began overplaying.
We started the season playing as we had to win the Champions League and Premier League title and then we bizarrely started the overplaying tappy crappy garbage, it was really confusing, because all the movement, the forwards runs off the back of a defender, the midfielders movement to be in a position to win any second ball and the full backs movement from deeper positions to be found with switches or support the switch to Mane or Mo was all still there, so to me at least, ditching all of that was always going to cause the kind of issue we've had and break down automation built up over 3 seasons and play some players out of form or not play to their strengths.
We've had a lot of issues to deal with this season, but we made a lot of our own problems by fucking about with things that were still working brilliantly that should have been left well alone, VAR has been an issue this season too, there's no getting away from that, we're 12 points down from what we should have because of that and would and should be sitting second right now, in retrospect possibly higher because that also affected our form and results in other games there wasn't plain corrupt calls in
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