It may be a nice idea Swab but it clearly doesn't work. Mourinho, van Gaal, Pellegrini and Wenger have a more hectic schedule than us and you never ever hear them complain about a lack of training time. I just thought it was pathetic and feeble myself. I have no doubt that if he needs to he can call the players in for extra training, it will be in their contracts.
The thing is this for me, after the players have been here for a while then the time required to absorb his tactics will lessen. No game plan will ever deviate so severely that it would take a week to drum into them. I'm just not buying this excuse, it made me cringe when he said it, it made him look like a whinger.
I'm afraid that if he does indeed educate his players then this Season the majority of them have failed their exams severely. You might train 'dogs' but it's the lack of fight in the 'dog' that derailed our Season so badly. It's not all about educating, there has to be a balance for me. It just so happened that when we needed dogs to show some fight we ended up with a bunch of Andrex puppies.
Nicely put, and I find myself nodding in agreement as I read this.
Another training concern is that the players seemed to lack fitness throughout the season.
When I look at the top 4, and think back to the great Liverpool teams, these teams all got stronger, fitter and quicker as the season went on, leading to the players being at peak fitness for the run in.
We seemed to struggle early, hit a peak of fitness in the middle of the season in the unbeaten run and then struggled at the end of the season, which suggests to me that BR has got something wrong.
As much as I dislike ferguson, he was a master at getting his teams to peak fitness at just the right time, and it's something of a worrying trend that BR's teams don't achieve this.
We've seen the same dodgy start, a burst in the middle, then a tail in fitness towards the end off in every season he's been here. It's not always very noticeable, but it's there if you look.
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