Krafty
Well-Known Member
- May 26, 2004
- 4,794
- 2,135
Seeing the post about the Orient friendly, I got thinking about how our pre-season is going to differ this season.
Ramos wants us to play in gradually harder games, which I think is how normal pre-seasons go, but this time I think the general quality of opposition is better. We are in a tournament with Feyenoord (Anderlecht and Celtic as well I think) instead of one in South Africa against local teams
But I think the real difference will be what line ups Ramos chooses. I was at Orient last season, and saw us vs Inter a few seasons back, and you couldnt tell what formation we were really playing. Jol used to pick players that needed match time instead of playing a system everyone could get used to (I.E. three strikers started against Orient last pre-season, but we rarely played with three upfront). As we constantly had a turnover of players, I think this cost us last season, and the fact that the players were still unfit according to Alvarez indicates that this pre-season we will do a much better job and be in much better shape physically and tactically when the new season kicks off
Ramos wants us to play in gradually harder games, which I think is how normal pre-seasons go, but this time I think the general quality of opposition is better. We are in a tournament with Feyenoord (Anderlecht and Celtic as well I think) instead of one in South Africa against local teams
But I think the real difference will be what line ups Ramos chooses. I was at Orient last season, and saw us vs Inter a few seasons back, and you couldnt tell what formation we were really playing. Jol used to pick players that needed match time instead of playing a system everyone could get used to (I.E. three strikers started against Orient last pre-season, but we rarely played with three upfront). As we constantly had a turnover of players, I think this cost us last season, and the fact that the players were still unfit according to Alvarez indicates that this pre-season we will do a much better job and be in much better shape physically and tactically when the new season kicks off
