LegendaryKeown wrote:theHotHead wrote:LegendaryKeown wrote:theHotHead wrote:Whats not to get, makes perfect sense and should be what Emery is doing. Play to the strengths of the players he has until he can mould the team to his liking by bringing in players suited to it. Its not rocket science.
It's not what top managers do today. Did Pep play direct? Did Klopp eschew pressing?
Huh?? What does any of that have to do with my post?
The point is that Pep and Klopp did not play to the style of the player. City could possibly have won the title in his first season with direct football. They had the pace. That's just not Pep's way though.
Klopp could also conceivably have attempted to play more direct football with Benteke up top in his first year but chose not to
Pep didn't need to do much to a star laden Man City team that already dominated possession. Pep therefore played to the strengths of the Man City players.
Klopp also played to the strengths of his players, you claim Klopp could have played direct with Benteke, but Benteke didn't play a lot of the season, he made 14 or 15 appearances only during that season, according to Wiki. Coutinho and Firmino made 24 appearances, Sturridge 11, Lallana 23 and Ibe 12. So you can see the template for the way they play football now being made early on in his tenure, the foundations well and truly laid. He preferred small, nimble, technical players that could interchange seamlessly, as they do now. They scored 63 goals that season, only Leicester (68), Spurs (69), Man City (71), Arsenal (65) and West Ham (65) scored more goals than them. the only player Klopp brought in in January was Marko Grujić, so clearly he was happy to work with the players he had.