A conversation around Poch & some general thoughts on the recruitment and tactical approach

My views with some input from Si....

Good Afternoon Ladies and Gents,

Happy New Year to you all and I hope you have all had a lovely festive period.

I have been away from my daily articles since a few days before Christmas and having a much needed chill time with family, but I am back now and buzzing to get back to releasing daily articles for you all.

Since my last contribution we have had the disappointing Xmas Eve defeat to Wolves which Raheem Sterling is 95% accountable for in my view, although I am far from his harshest critic. We then have had two really good wins and performances against Crystal Palace and Luton (apart from the last 20 v Luton).

It is safe to say that helped me enjoy the festive period a lot easier.

After the Crystal Palace game Si and I exchanged some messages as I wanted to get his opinion on a few things that I thought the club and the hierarchy, as well as what Poch could do against Luton with his attack, at the time I didn’t know that Mudryk was injured and in hindsight giving Nkunku a rest was a good idea (why I rate Poch’s man-management highly).

I wanted Poch to play a front 4 of Mudryk (LW), Palmer (CAM), Noni (RW), Nkunku (ST), with Nkunku and Palmer rotating between who drops deep and who stays a little higher. I still believe that currently this is our best attack until we solve our long term ST problem. Si agreed with me and I think the majority of the fanbase called for the same thing.

We then went on to discuss Poch, I asked Si if he had any question marks over Poch and at the same time detailed what mine were;

I said; The Colwill LB experiment is frustrating but Maatsen proved tonight (v Palace) that he is uncomfortable at the level, for me, and maybe he wants to be a winger/attacker, otherwise why would he not say to Poch I only want to play LB? The only other Poch issue I have is the slow build up and lack of forward planning with our passing, it should be like snooker, every player should be thinking 2/3/4 passes/moves ahead!

Si then said; Agree with all you said here. Poch has incredible man management but I think the rest can be questioned at the very least. Playing players out of position is a massive problem, and a lack of attacking patterns is another. He’s blatantly improves players like Mudryk, that’s obvious and evident. But his stubbornness, reliance on players who he seems to trust too much, and playing specialist players in wrong positions could actually end up being his downfall.

Neither of us have said ground breaking this here and very much what the entirety of the sane part of our fanbase are thinking/saying. But, my point is that Poch is doing a good job in my opinion apart from a few little issues that can/will change. He is being forced to play Levi at LB currently but even when he had fit LB’s he chose to play him there, lets see if that changes when the likes of Chilwell return.

My only other issues at the moment are the reoccurrence of individual errors, they seem to happen multiple times per game, Poch clearly asks them to play out from the back and they must work on it daily, BUT how a professional footballer can not decide to kick the ball up the field or out of play when they are under serious pressure is beyond me, it needs to be 95% training but 5% in game management/using your brain. I genuinely believe that slight tweak will improve our for massively.

Whenever we lose games or don’t play well it always stems from individual errors.

My last current issue is a club/recruitment one and this is me being a little bit picky, we have been pretty good in terms of recruitment in my view, I understand we don’t have a world-class no.9 and that in some peoples view we may have signed a few too many U21s/development players, BUT I can get past that. My issue is I believe that Axel Disasi as good as he can be and has been on occasions was the wrong player for a Poch system, and I am unconvinced on the ceiling of Nicolas Jackson, and this isn’t me giving him a hard time like pundits have been recently. I actually thought he was very good v Palace and Luton, BUT long term I do not see him hitting the levels needed to be a long term no.9 at Chelsea.

I would still argue that Broja has the higher long-term ceiling.

These are my views and opinions (with some input from Si) and I just wanted to share these with you all. Please give me yours in the comments!

Thanks for reading

Luke Rushbrook