Thursday 11 April 2019

Have AFCB lost their identity?

Eddie Howe has been saying that he is sending out a team that is playing like it has lost its identity. certainly the good play that AFCB have built their reputation on under Howe has been lacking of late, and the camaraderie and fun that the players typically show will have taken on a more serious tone as everyone looks at themselves and asks, are they doing enough?
Some missing faces has not helped the loss of form. 
It's possible that the players have stopped listening. They know the way Eddie wants to play, they do it every week and have become so sure that they know where they should be at a particular moment in a game that they are reacting, rather than using their own intuition to effect games. It is okay to play to a pattern, if everyone keeps their place and moves into the right space at the right time, but when it starts to go wrong and players find themselves out of position, the wheels have a tendency to come off.

Eddie Howe likes working on patterns of play and creating situations where his players out number the opposition, because of the movement the players have made. But at the moment, the attackers are not getting past defences, and at the back there are too many individual errors to build a good defensive base. It's not one thing that has gone array, we are supposed to believe it's the AFCB philosophy of playing that has suddenly crumbled.

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But Howe is the organiser and chief in charge of the philosophy. His job is to get the players playing to a style that they are comfortable with and don't have any fear of sticking to when they go out on the field. Until the players can find their inner strength to believe they are going to do the right things on the pitch, they will struggle. It may need for Howe to do something completely different in training, just to break the routine and get players back in their feel good place, because they haven't forgotten the AFCB way of playing. They just aren't executing it very well at the moment.

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