For years now we've been playing a style of football that is highly reliant on Bruno's hero ball antics. We're not necessarily going to be able to replace him and instantly play better football because switching to a different brand of football is a process. Old habits die hard
A player's ability to recognise patterns is a huge part of the game. In the best teams, you see a lot more intricate, cohesive patterns of play that result in their team creating chances
as a team. Moments that you'd look at and think that it must've come from the training ground. Their players' pattern recognition capabilities are focused on those well-coached team drills
The problem is, we're not a well-coached team. We play a style of football that is highly reliant on Bruno and we have an entire team of footballers whose pattern recognition is aligned to what Bruno does. He gets a lot of "chances created" because he spams attacking passes and our past few managers have been completely fine with that
People say that we struggle to create chances as a team which they argue makes Bruno invaluable to us. Bruno clearly loves being the focal point of the team and his natural instincts are always going to result in him looking up and seeing if there's a ball on, and often playing it even if it's a highly unlikely that it would be a successful pass. He's played like that throughout his entire career, so my argument has always been that the reason we struggle to create chances as a team is because our managers are too scared to branch away from the tried and tested Bruno-ball and towards the trepidatious but potentially much more fruitful approach of implementing intricate football. Bruno-ball isn't successful enough for where we want our club to be, but it's just about successful enough for some out-of-their-depth managers to hold onto their jobs for far too long
Scholes called Bruno out last season for his play style not resulting in a consistent pattern that his teammates can adapt to:
“He possibly is trying to almost be a Roy of the Rovers character, he’s trying to be everywhere, he’s trying to help everywhere but sometimes on a football pitch you can run too much. You can do too much, you can be in too many areas of the field. I think it’s messing the whole team structure up.
“I can imagine playing with him in central midfield and I wouldn’t know where he was – where is he? Where is he? You would have to be telling him all the time ‘look, stay there, stay in the position’, It’s no good you being on the left hand side or the right hand side or going to get the ball off the centre halves, there his no pattern to your play and you don’t know where your players are.”
“You see Newcastle, every one of those players know where each other is. Is that coaching? I don’t know. Is it discipline from them, ill-discipline from Manchester United? When you know where people are, you wouldn’t understand how much of a difference that makes to your football team.
The only reason I'd be happy with Bruno continuing to be the focal point of the team is if we were racking up the major trophies, but we're not. I'd personally rather us finish 10th building towards playing a style of football that the top teams play than having Bruno leading us to 5th. We're potentially stifling some top talents with this self-defeating brand of football
So no, I don't think the answer to our problems are going to be solved the second Bruno is removed from the team, particularly when the replacement is some right back we just signed. We're going to actually have to try teaching the team how to play football that isn't reliant on Bruno spamming balls. The sooner we start doing that the better
yeah, you poor misunderstood baby. Only pointing stuff out. Really a bin fire with all the questionable people around here.