he shook the same bad defenders twice...
i can't say if those defenders are good or bad, as i don't watch them playing on a regular basis (actually i don't even know their names).... as most of us, i guess.
and by looking at this play,
we cannot say they seem to be bad either, as this is not poor defending.
just look at the play. the covering is pretty much perfect.
there are 2 players who tried to put pressure on him (one of em seems to be a midfielder, the other one is a defender), but he got rid of em and avoided the tackle with a really nice move (i saw henry doing that trick hundreds of times in his carreer..... but of course, when henry does it, he's a great player, when somebody we don't know does it, then the defenders were crap.... sure).
the rest of the defensive line is set up on coverage, and that's why u don't see them trying to tackle him.
and this is exactly what they had to do, coz dembele is not a foward, he's a midfielder. So, trying to put pressure on him with more than those 2 players would have left a hole in the defensive line and would have left a foward free from any marking.
Funnily this is a tipycal mistake of premiership clubs. they focus their defensive asset mainly on pressing. So,
since u can't press and cover at the same time, as soon as the defenders move foward to put pressure on the ball carrier, they leave a hole behind them, screw the whole defensive line displacement, and (if the ball carrier is a midfielder) they also leave a foward free from marking.
This would have been poor defending. this is what most of premiership teams do, several times per match, every week.
but this is not what those defenders did on this play. first they tried to put pressure on dembele. then, once both their tries failed, they didn't loose their coolness, they didn't send more players to press him, forgetting about protecting the box. they hold their position and tried to avoid dembele getting inside a shooting range.
unfortunately they weren't able to do this as, once again, with a fantastic move, he was able to get rid of 3 defenders in the same time and found enough space to shot.
and once again, this was not a huge mistake by the defenders, coz most of the credit goes to demebele's move. if it would have been a "wide dribbling" with the ball 1 meter far from dembele's foot, then the defenders should have got the ball. but dembele's move was very "tight", the ball is glued to his foot (nice touch).
so it's not like those defenders were crap coz they didn't get the ball. dembele kept the ball always close to his foot and showed a very good ball control.
someone might say that somebody should have bring him down with a foul, but that's wrong aswell. once he got rid of those 2 guys on pressing, he reached the box pretty soon (and once inside the box a foul would have resulted in a penalty).
sure this is not the best defensive effort ever..... but honestly it's not really poor either.... and however it's still way better than the average defensive efforts in premiership (just to be clear, man utd, liverpool, city, everton and chelsea do not represent the premiership standard).
Yesterday Cassano scored a nice goal, humililating atalanta's defensive line. but sure u won't hear anybody complaining about atalanta's defenders mistakes (except del neri, of course), because when a guy can dribble 2 players keeping the ball 20\30 centimeters far from his foot, then u have to praise the scorer rather than blaming the defenders.
Peter said:
To be frank, I haven't see enough of him, so I wouldn't call him world class or something special after scoring a one of a kind goal like that
yeah definitely. me too i can't really say what this guy is really about, as i didn't see him playing enough. but still, anytime i saw him, he gave me a pretty good impression
