AM’

This is so apt. There’s no other way to look at it. I said in a previous post that Flick is just another step in the right direction, but he’s not the man to take us to the promised land. How can he be that man when he keeps failing to beat big teams? When his original contract expires in 2028, he should walk away without even considering the option of extending it for another year.

There seems to be an unwritten rule among coaches: they don't expose to the public the weaknesses of another team. It's very rare when a coach does it, to expose the other team verbally. But Mourinho has now done it for 2 seasons in a row. Last season, Benfica faced a Porto side that had won every game until then. Porto were playing well and dominating. Then Mourinho held them to a 0-0 draw, in a game where Porto couldn't even create a big chance. He did this by letting the CBs have the ball and always focusing the pressure on the CDM, Alan Varela, to disrupt Porto's build up. He explained this in a press conference, saying this is how you hold Porto down, and later even called them "easy to analyse". And all of a sudden, this is how every team started playing against Porto (Moreirense started it straight away, in the following matchday). And the quality of Porto's game decreased massively. Porto were still champions, in this case, but playing one of the most boring and pragmatic types of football that the country had ever seen, from the moment they faced Mourinho's Benfica in matchday 8. And now he has broken that unwritten rule once again. Mourinho beat Barcelona and explained to everyone that the way to break their high line is to have the midfielders running in behind, because their high line is not prepared to cover them. I wonder if we're now going to see a lot of teams using their midfielders to exploit the space against Barcelona, and if that will have any big impact on Barcelona's win rate (which was 100% until now) for the rest of the season.