Weirdly the one game where I remember the opposition striker actually scaring me was hojlund, when he came on Gabriel clearly had a much harder time dealing with his physicality compared to whoever started that game (Martial?). But in the end that was a pretty comfortable victory

I mean he usually beats our left backs (zinchenko is not the best one on one defender) he just has awful end product / decision making. But actually keeping him quiet the entire match is an accomplishment imo

I think it’s like Arsenal towards the end of last season. maybe they only have 5 injuries or whatever but several of them happen to overlap in the same position. Spurs started Dier (1st start / 2nd match he’s played all season) and Ben Davies at CB…

Arsene Wenger signed Petr Cech who wasn’t good at playing the ball, so the next manager would sign Leno who was better on the ball but had other weaknesses knowing it would give Emi Martinez a chance and…

I mean he signed Toure for like 250k, Vermaelen/Koscielny/Holding were also decent signings that weren’t well known (assuming you don’t give him credit for players like Campbell and Mertesacker since they were already well known players not diamonds in the rough). Most of the players on this list were either young cheap prospects (djourou senderos) or meant to be backups from day 1 (cygan squillaci silvestre stepanovs) and they played too much maybe bc the first choice players got injured or whatever. But I think mustafi was the only major failure since we spent a lot of money expecting him to be a regular CL quality starter.

Senderos did too, he started the fa cup final we won against united and also during the CL run to the final when we set a record for most consecutive clean sheets. He just had a few awful games getting bullied by Drogba in particular and his confidence completely went away.

His career arc was honestly closer to someone like Rob Holding than some of these other players who were terrible from match 1.