If Odegaard and Havertz works, then why can't Mount and Bruno?

[noodlehair]

Although true, I'd make a small tweak to it - even with Mainoo on the pitch Casemiro seems like he has too much to do, both #8s starting position is just too high and they should be more compact in midfield, but the manager wants to play direct football not waste the energy for meaningless horizontal/short passes + we must be the only team that presses high and has low defensive line.
Casemiro is actually close to perfect DM for how ETH wants to play (I think he got really lucky with Case), the problem is he seems like his legs are truly gone and his tackling ability has gone south. As a result we rarely intercept the ball in midfield, what is crucial to our transition game. I do believe Casemiro is done at this level and no formation will make this work with him as DM (especially that Mainoo is another low-energy CM, he need a different midfield partner).

Even once we replace Casemiro, neither of Mount / Bruno are capable of playing Odegaard role, they are both suited to perform as pure #10/second striker, but this setup doesn't make sense, we'll still struggle to build from the back. We need two #8s wable to box who are comfortable dropping deep and helping in each phase of the game AND on top of that we can give them more freedom to make runs into the box/out wide. Mount is the right player to perform all those tasks, but Bruno makes sense only in 4231 setup.

This would be the right moment to replace Bruno in the team (or at least phase him out) as we're actually not relying on him anywhere as much as in the previous seasons to create/score. But we don't need another #10, we need Casemiro replacement as Mainoo is already our best midfielder and very clearly not a DM, and "Mount-and-Bruno"midfield will no longer be a topic.

I've been saying this all season but I don't think its anything to do with Casemiro's legs being gone. If the plan is to intercept the ball high then its more, not less important, that the no10s aren't too high, because as soon as the ball is past them its game over.

Casemiro can have all the legs and energy he wants, if he is effectively a one man defensively line, any pass or even clearance that isn't directly towards him, he isn't going to be favourite for. I don't think its even complicated, if its one player vs 2-3 across an area and width of the pitch, its impossible for that player to position themselves somewhere they can be favourite to win the ball or even have a realistic chance of doing so. It wouldn't matter if they had the pace of Usain Bolt and energy of Kante.

If you've got Casemiro and Mainoo in midfield and still struggle to keep the ball or string a pass together against every single opponent, then that is a problem with the system, not the players.

This could all be solved by just playing Mainoo slightly deeper so he is alongside Casemiro, which is what we did with Eriksen and Fred last season, and would be a much more sensible, easy, and logical solution than saying "we need to drop Bruno and then sign another no10 who isn't really a no10 and then also hope Mount becomes less useless than he has been for nearly 3 years now, or sign ANOTHER no10 who isn't a no10 and then also sign a replacement for Casemiro".

Also I'm really fecking sick of having to say this in every thread on this bloody forum, but not every solution to our team HAS to involve dropping Bruno. Especially if you have to go to extreme length like replacing 3-4 other players and expecting another to magically get much better in order for dropping Bruno to be the solution.

At the moment the solution is that our manager needs to get into his head what a midfield is, and this has been our single biggest problem the entire season. He wont set us up with a functioning midfield even now when he has the players available to actually pick a pretty decent one and even puts them on the pitch together.