BVB's log, stardate 47634.44. It is the first game of the post Bosz-ball era... Bürki Toljan Sokratis Toprak Schmelzer Weigl Kagawa Guerreiro Yarmo Auba Pulisic
Started watching five minutes or so and our possession game looks fairly stagnant, like one of those bad games under Tuchel.
Yeah, we have much possession but not much else besides Auba's opportunity. Not really a pleasure to watch. But babysteps I guess. As unsatisfying as it is, a draw is better than a loss and right now, we can be happy with the draw. Mainz are only waiting for counterattacks and mistakes on our part.
Couple of points: - Peter Bosz was a complete fraud. He literally lived off of rh exceptional work that Thomas Tuchel Bad left behind. - Schmelzer sucks really bad without exceptional coaching. - Gurreiro needs to be played as a LB. - Kagawa is the definition of a frustrating player. Someone who has the skills and the abilities but doesn't live upto it. On the contrary Castro is not a frustrating player. He is just flat out useless.
Stöger won't win a lot of plaudits for fluid and positive attacking play, but some defensive emphasis to grind out games might be what the team needs right now.
Awful stuff , terrible execution on front of goal again and again . This should help confidence though , which is clearly shot .
In Götze's absence, MoM is Jeremy Toljan. Overall, the midfield was excellent. Defence could be better but we got a clean sheet. Looking forward to seeing wins from now on since we have a real coach.
BTW Nagelsmann was watching BVB Play from the stands. He wanted to see who he would ask Aki to get rid of. I hope Toprak, Sahin and Schmelzer are in that list of his right after Schürrle and Rode.
Result is good, but it was a strange game. Could have been another loss, but we also could have scored 5. Not the prettiest match, but I don't think that this is what Stöger's philosophy will be. It looks more controlled but the team still struggled. Auba's example showed what an impact just a few good scenes can have for your confidence. Dahoud is still really off, though. It's great to finally have someone in that position who thinks about making a forward pass, but some of his passes or decisions were headscratchers.
Not sure if we watched the same game but his 1 on 1 defending was atrocious and this has been the case in most games he's featured in this season. Maybe is due to a lack of confidence but his game does not inspire any confidence at all. He was decent going forward but needs to be more aggressive and trust his athleticism more but defensively he leaves a lot to be desired.
Yarmolenko had a great game today as he was everywhere on the pitch especially his defensive work today. The one big thing Stoeger will need to get the team to focus on is defensive backtracking by the midfielders especially down our left flank as Guerreiro and Pulisic really struggle with this aspect which was a big factor in the first half where Mainz were able to get through to our 16-yard box with ease every time they got the ball.
I think Mo needs a good coach and he's finally got one. Perhaps we are all being overly critical. Let's give them all some time with PS and see what comes of it.
Class act: Hellmann: ... besseres Spielermaterial ... (better tools) Stöger: Spieler sind kein Material. (players aren tools) Hellmann: Naja, Sie wissen ja, was ich meine. (you know what I mean) Stöger: Sie wissen auch, was *ich* meine. (you also know what I mean)
To be more clear, I was rather commenting on Dahoud's current form, I'm not doubting his abilities. This is similar to Bartra's series of bad games last season when he made mistakes that were surprising, to put it mildly, but they were the kind of mistakes that weren't indicative of the player's quality under normal circumstances. As for Toljan, if I had to choose a Top 3 of things where Bosz failed, he would be in it. The moment Piszczek got injured should have been the last signal to spend every minute in training to prepare him and give him as much playing time as possible on the RB position. When Klopp can convert strikers into FBs, we could have surely helped him to improve on his positional weaknesses. Maybe it's just subjective but for me it also feels that the way he was utilized in regards to when he was benched and when he got playing time to gain confidence in contrast to playing time against top teams was not optimal.
All this does is further highlight how incompetent the management were in firstly hiring Bosz and then taking so long to do the blatantly obvious and fire him. Completely inexcusable and could have seriously damaged the development of the likes of Weigl, Dahoud and Toljan had it gone on any longer, which incredibly was a possibility up until the Werder match. Glad some sense was finally seen but how long before the management ********s up again?