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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
my concern was not with insane fan demands but with the soufflé quality of pep's tactics. either they rise magnificently or they fall completely flat. bayern scores 6 goals or gets 4 scored-- no 1-0s.
what the articles showed for me is the vulnerability to counterattacks. two of those articles are pep's admission of that fact, in different years.
in 2014 pep returned with a new system that was meant to be more counter-proof. that has worked against easy teams when bayern dominates them *completely*
but when bayern doesn't achieve total domination the expressway to the goal becomes wide open. wide wide wide. hence the massacres. the zonal marking article linked actually mentions how under heynckes this vulnerability did not exist (that was at the end of the prior season though. pep has made changes since them).
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I understand what you're saying. I just think it happens so rarely that it isn't an issue. For me Pep isn't a 'safe' manager. He plays things at the edge. What's remarkable is that his teams aren't more vulnerable than they are.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i don't know why i feel like my thoughts here are being conflated with those of megalomaniac fans, but i don't want bayern to win all the time-- in fact i've preferred to follow other teams like poor dortmund this year because something like bayern vs. stuttgart is no contest at all.
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They're not. At least not by me. I'm talking about fans I read on football sites who try to pass off critcisms of Pep's methods with what i increasingly think a thinly disguised dislike of him personally.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
heynckes transparency and apparent good sense, rejecting what appeared to me like unreliable and unpredictable experiments.
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Completely get that. And it just comes down to preferences. I love that experimentalism but I can completely understand why other people don't. Remember my team is run by a manager for whom pragmatism is all, and i hate it. I'd far rather we lose a game with some style than to draw one by playing things safe.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
the achilles heel is the lack of pace of the central defenders (dante, benatia, badstuber on the mend, a mature alonso in front of them) that leaves a chunnel in front of the goal when bayern can't overwhelm the oponent.
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I suppose, while for you that's a problem, for me it's just the price paid for what he does in other areas. At Barcelona there was always that sense that if a team could really get at their defence they had a real chance. It just seems like a quirk of his philosophy. Equally, people have worked out that if you back off against a Mourinho team, they don't really know how to cope. They're not especially comfortable taking the initiative. Although Mourinho's addressed that a bit it's still there.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
i'm sure it wasn't unexpected for lopetegui and he planned it that way. others will do that as well.
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Agree. And one of the things i love about watching these top managers, with very definite ideas, is the way other managers try to counter them. Even if they don't succeed, because they maybe just don't have the quality of players to do it, I still like seeing tactical victories, even if the result doesn't quite reflect them. Giving Sam at West Ham his due, he completely out-tactic'd Jose this season, even if, at the death, Chelsea grabbed a winner. Tactical superiority is one thing. Eden Hazard is another.