Claudius The problem with a lot of these strikers is the impact they have on the rest of the team. We need a nine who can press and create. We are a very fluid team, and playing with Nketiah (much of the first half of the season), has shown us how little movement and integration we have up front. The desire to upgrade on Jesus shouldn’t be at the detriment of the rest of the forwards. Saka and Odegaard are our best players. We need to elevate them and others.
To blame our lack of this fluidity and the negative impact on Nketiah, a player who I don't think is good enough for us anyways, is a bit much. Nketiah started some games earlier in the season when some of us were complaining and how poor we are in creating chances and goals outside of penalties. This was deemed at the time as the midfield settling in and focussing on making our defence even stronger before we focussed on making our attack click.
In that time Nketiah did play as up top for us, as did Havertz, as did Jesus when he became fit and despite that our attacking game was static and slow no matter who played. We now have Havertz at striker instead of Nketiah and Jesus, however this same issue remained no matter who we played back then.
We've tweaked some stuff more recently in the period just before the break and during those losses where we still created a lot. I reckon that's more to do with set up and instructions when you have the current players who are doing what they've been doing since December (obviously with better finishing that those dropped points games), being unable to do it between August and early December.
A player like Nketiah may make us go back into being a static team again, he frustrates me a lot when he plays, but him being taken out was not the trigger that changed us into a fluid team. That came some mknths later.
