All these games mean nothing surprised people still try and take stuff from it.
Rather watch the rain fall on the covers in Southampton.
Why is there always an excuse for our games when we don’t win or play well? It’s either; number of games in a short space of time, there’s been a break from playing, it’s only a friendly etc etc.
Like it or not, friendlies are important because it’s when you hope everything starts clicking so that you are ready for the new season.
If we get twatted in a friendly, with virtually our strongest line up, for example 4-0 a week before the season starts then I’d be feeling a bit concerned because by that point in our preparation we should have the mistakes and things out of the way.
We were declining in form in the build up to the lockdown, we were poor after the restart but it was dismissed because they’d been a break from playing and there’s been no real break since the season finished so by now, I wouldn’t expect to be seeing the kind of mistakes we were seeing today which were a continuation of what was happening on the season run in.
Against Stuttgart, in far worse conditions, we looked a lot more composed. Today was another performance of the team looking as if the concentration wasn’t there and going through the motions.
The young players like Hoever, Elliot etc it is just a case of getting some minutes out of them and gradually integrating them into the team so mistakes from them are to be expected, especially against a team like Salzburg who are no pushovers, yet the worst performances today were from virtually our strongest available 11 in the first hour of the game.
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