We deserved the semis. Our second half performance was much better than the first and we dominated throughout the match.
Papu - not a bad debut, he will take time to adapt as he played a central role in Atalanta, and he was leaning towards the AMF role tonight as well at times. He is good in overall.
Vidal - Hopefully we won’t jinx it, but he’s playing really well and we almost do not feel the absence of Navas with him on the pitch.
Suso is on monster form, I hope he keeps it up - that was an amazing cross to Ocampos who scored and gave a dejavu feeling of his goal against Wolves, only that time the one who crossed was Banega.
Munir is not on form lately and now with Papu here he will get less and less minutes, unless Lope makes room for him in a striker role somehow. He shouldn’t have missed that amazing mini-cross from Suso, that was a pitiful miss.
Kounde only had one mistake where he couldn’t contain Umar Sadiq there but DC came to help brilliantly. Then after that he pocketed Sadiq all the time - definitely amazing performance.
As Tim said, average - I’d say below average in overall. Good in defense but that’s all. We saw how he performed against bigger teams like Chelsea, but he will look terrible against any proper team because he will defend, not agile and quick enough to do so in the LB position on a 4-3-3, but he won’t attack, just like he didn’t do it today. Countless of chances to link up with Papu but none used, because his mind is not used to attacking, only defending. It is a failed experiment of Lope to try him at LB but it will work when we can beat teams with 1 fully functioning wing only (winger and full back).
Totally depends on who we play against. Tonight we could’ve fielded any of our players that can defend at LB and we’d still have a clean sheet. We could have Gnagnon, Sergi Gomez, Fernando, Gudelj there and the same would happen.
A club like ours shouldn’t be happy with that, that would be a mid-table club mentality - to be content with a LB that puts in 2 crosses (that do not reach anyone anyway) in the first half. I’m not picking on Rekik, because he is not even a LB to begin with, but experimenting and trying to improvise with that position in the 4-3-3 is always risky. Now of course we can’t do much when there’s no other proper LB available, but that’s why you buy or loan in someone to fix that, especially when you know that 2 of your true LB’s are injured or coming out of nasty injuries of the past.
I would’ve liked for him to be at least like a poor man’s Branislav Ivanovic as he was also defensive minded, but still far from that. It’s more about the 4-3-3 rather than anything - there’s a chance Rekik could do much better in a classic 4-2-3-1 as a LB.
Can’t agree that. The ball ricocheted up once and directly back down after contact with the Almeria player, the side angle shows clearly that Papu was not near. The referee’s angle shows two hands at the same height and from his angle he cannot differentiate who it was. But he ignored the VAR, I guess it was a team effort, can’t really blame the ref apart from not looking at the VAR in person.
