Even after that scoreline, what has me still shaking my head half a day later is their captain actually requesting to be subbed to avoid being further associated with the drubbing.
Holy fuckballs as a coach you know your decision-making is suspect when you make someone with such a weak mentality your captain.
If a Liverpool player got on like that I’d never want to see them in the shirt again. Absolute embarrassment and can never be trusted. Can only think of Ballotelli and Diouf as anything that have come close for us
I joked about it, but I think a lot of it was due to the negative effect of Pogba, and to a lesser extent Ronaldo. What Fernandez is good at is complaining about other people not doing their job. When those two were around his complaints looked like brave leadership, standing up to big personalities in the interest of the collective. Now they have gone all he has left to do is to actually walk the walk. And he cannot.
A bit lost in this all was the decision to remove Martinez from his misery and see out the last 20 minutes of the game with a FB filling in for him at CB. For the way he played from the outset to see him fall flat on his face on the third and then be subbed off so Luke Shaw could play CB was just
It is not a criticism, that first touch was phenomenal, completely sent Varane the wrong way and right out of the play, then the second to just put it in the goal from the space he created. Well worth watching carefully, absent the euphoria of the whole match, simply for the superb technique. Gakpo sells Varane on a drive to the baseline, then turns himself and redirects the ball 90 degrees in one motion. Varane was probably quietly relieved that his poor play there was buried under the subsequent avalanche.