I’m struggling with what your points are over the last few weeks Mark. You know football a lot better than what you seem to be saying.
You seem to be pinning a lot of blame on the players and taking it all away from Bruno and suggesting these are sort of a Sunday league rabble as they have no independent thought. They obviously haven’t made it to the the top level if that’s the case.
But at the top level These fine margins make a difference. Even Bournemouth’s “shit” players are really fucking good. So having no good patterns of play is where the problem is. They certainly don’t have “no plan, do what you want”.
Raul is sitting on his heels because the instruction is clearly not to cross it, so he doesn’t know when to time a run. The players then cut back, have nothing on so just lump it in anyway. MM had a very basic plan. Jarvis stand up his full back, work a yard and then float a cross the back post where Fletcher has peeled off and had a header. Simple plan we got loads of goals from.
If the players aren’t on the same wavelength because of some garbled plan of going wide but not crossing then you’re not going to get that fine margin to be one step ahead of your defender and get a shot away. So then he looks stupid when a cross goes near post and he hasn’t made a run, and the opposite when he makes a run and the player has cut back to midfield only for him to be out the game and offside.
I'm not taking anything away from Bruno, he's doing nothing at all to help the situation. My argument is that the players are largely just as culpable whereas most think they're brilliant players being actively ruined, the only people I'm currently seeing come out of this season positively so far are Collins and Kilman.
As I see it your have a sort of base level of ability within the squad, a good manager/plan will build on that, maximise those fine margins and make everyone a bit better. A really bad manager/plan will push people below that level by asking stupid things. I'm thinking stuff like AVBs stupidly high line with no pressure, Rob Edwards asking average Championship fullbacks to play inverted, they're suicide calls, you're legitimately setting people up to fail. I don't see Bruno as that actively harmful, more negligent.
You cite the example of Jarvis and Fletcher, I don't see that as a marginal gain by good management, that to me was player lead improvement largely by Fletcher. That was Jarvis' only play, couldn't cross with his left and could get any pace on it when he cut back to his right so you got floaty back post toss. Doyle never made any progress in deciphiring that play, only Fletcher, if that was on Mick then surely all the forwards would've made that move?
That's what I'm seeing with Wolves now, or not seeing in this case, Lage sets them up with the most basic of plans but the players aren't adding anything to it. They should be capable of figuring something out for themselves but they very rarely seem to. You say Jimenez doesn't move because he can't read anyone's delivery but he's had about 6 different wide players around him at Wolves with the same issue everytime and it's not like he makes a move that doesn't usually pay off, he literally makes no move at all.
These players largely appear to need a lot of guidance, Pep style levels of micromanagement to drill in routine time and time again. Yesterday you had Kilman and Collins both taking advantage of situations/freedom and found themselves within 5-10 yards of the box multiple times. No-one else in the team seemed to react to that in anyway, no movement to drag defenders away or try to overload somewhere, they all just stand and watch one another.
If I went to work somewhere where the management turned out to be completely clueless I wouldn't automatically forget how to do every basic aspect of my job. I wouldn't blindly follow every duff instruction knowing it was going to go badly. These people aren't robots, they've played for some big teams under top managers and they should be able to carry across some of that learning to bridge gaps in times like these. At the moment no-one appears to have any clue what to do with one another, there's no chemistry player to player or squad to coach, the whole thing is broken.
