Ekeke
Full Member
Sadly, in Casemiro's case the amount of tackles usually directly correlates with the amount of chances the opponents get. Even in good games like tonight he's extremely committal and always goes for a tackle — and when he misses it (which happens fairly often nowadays), he's left there, completely outplayed, and the forward usually has a free run at our goal.
At his peak he was a little sharper (which meant that he usually went into a tackle exactly at the right time and not a moment too late) and much, much more athletic and mobile, which also helped him to cover a lot of ground. In this current state he's a liability against any side where the opposing forwards can dribble or pass the ball around with pace. His on the ball quality and experience is enough to produce good performances against poor sides — it's not a coincidence that he truly shined in our League Cup fixtures this season; or he can still do a job in a low block when we park the bus without any intention of contesting the midfield, but I don't think that Amorim prefers that or is going to choose that style against City.
Well you're right he does go 100% into slide tackles and they dont come in at the speed they used to, but those tackles are on top of the successful ones I mentioned as I'm only counting those.
Point is that like our fullbacks our central players do way more defensive work than the corresponding positions at the better teams, even when a team has 30 something percent of the ball against us.
In this case its because he was playing next to Bruno so he had to do a double shift defensively. Sometimes Bruno wins the ball a lot and in this game he didnt. So it all fell on Casemiro and he did a lot but our defense was still exposed many times and the opponents had many shots. Casemiro himself had the most blocked shots with 2 so he also helped with that. And 15 shots is still down from the 20 we were conceding last season, but its still a large amount for a team that didnt have much of the ball