That’s a fairly pointless opening paragraph there, of course I think I’m right; everyone expressing an opinion here believe they are right.
You could say that, but to me that shows a misunderstanding of how a team should press. You check the players behind you, you position yourself to cut off the passing avenues and then you push at an angle to maintain that. You then have a reliance on the players behind you to step up into those areas, compress the space, and force the opposition to go long or back. As soon as you have a player like Matic neglect his role in that press, whether through negligence or through a physical inability, then you let down the player ahead of you. I suggest you actually watch what happens before the press and not just the space that is created afterwards. We saw the positives of having a team compressing the space in midfield and press effectively when Ole first took over. Matic was actually stepping forwards and not backwards when opposition players got the ball in midfield. Yet again you’re reducing it to what a player does or doesn’t do. If I compared Tom Huddlestone to De Bruyne in terms of passing and creativity, you’d laugh. Both have good vision, but one of them is better on the ball than the other.
You’re swimming against the current then. Irrespective of whether you think he is good enough or not, Herrera’s intelligence is almost universally accepted as being pretty high. You’ve just reaffirmed to me you can’t see the difference between a player that presses, and one that presses well.
See! You don’t just follow a player around to mark them out of the game, particularly when that player is quicker with a lower centre of gravity.
I don’t know if I can be bothered with this anymore. I don’t usually call people out for not knowing what they’re talking about, but that second to last paragraph shows such a lack of understanding to this side of the game, that I struggle to see where we go from here. There’s believing he is or isn’t good enough, and then there is this.