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Perhaps a little worse than I feared, but Benfica are a very good side and I figured they’d expose our weaknesses. Starting four forwards and a centre half with the ability to get forward like David Luiz, it was always going to be tough in the Algarve heat.
No excuses, we looked short on ideas, movement, quality, you name it. However, there aren’t too many sides in England that you could draw parallels to Benfica. Sure, we should expect to come up against their quality and style of play in Europe, but I wouldn’t get too concerned about this in terms of the Premier League.
That said, we have very little quality in the middle of the park, that’s clear, and we should expect to get overrun frequently if that can’t be resolved. We can talk about 20 a season strikers all we like, but if you don’t have the ball and can’t keep it when you do, what good does that do you?
That’s all I’ll say at this stage, there’s plenty that can be expanded upon, but there’s time to go into that before the season kicks off.
I’d like to thank everyone who stopped by the Matchday Live page, it will be something I will look at doing again in the future, but I’m not sure it will be a regular, regular feature. Still, it was fun, thank you.
Starting XI: Friedel; L Young, Cuellar, Dunne, Shorey; Albrighton, Petrov, Sidwell, A Young, Delfouneso, Heskey.
Subs: Carew, Guzan, Weimann, Warnock, Clark, Bannan, Davies, Lichaj, Beye, Downing, Reo-Coker.
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4 Comments to “Benfica 4 Aston Villa 1”
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It worked very well Dan, good job there.
I looked back on my half time comment last night and thought “ah, no worries, it’s just my usual HT kneejerk reaction”.
But having thought about it even more, not much has changed.
I know it was only a friendly, but as much as I carp on about them being meaningless, I found our footy really wanting.
Truth is, I can live with it when we’re being sucessful, as winning is all to me and I don’t care how we do it.
But when we lose, it does somewhat open my eyes.
I trust MON to get decent players in, no problem.
But I have nagging doubts that they will be sufficient to change the way we play.
We crave a couple of genuine flair players, that admittedly won’t contribute that much in the overall effort, but can turn a game in an instant.
Still it’s early days and MON has my unwavering support.
For now
funny you should mention not much changing from your first reaction. i’ve been playing around with a follow up, but i’ve heavily edited it several times, don’t want to go over the top, but the essense is pretty much the same as this post.
which i forgot about, but now i read again there’s some repetition, so it’s back to the editor again. the essence is that i dislike dismissing poor results or friendlies as meaningless games. winning can be habitual.
i know what you mean about dismissing the short comings when we get the results, but that’s the same for everyone. when it’s someone like Utd playing badly, but winning, we call it the hallmark of a quality side. when it’s us, we’re just lucky.
line up????!!
apologies. this one was different as it was just an extension of the live chat rather than a proper match report…. i’ve pasted the team sheet in.