Maintain tonight was on two problems, and Mount wasn't them:
1. Casemiro refusing to play as the deepest, most-defensively minded midfielder (at least until his legs went in the 75th minute or so)
2. Bruno having his worst match for us by a country mile
For this type of midfield to work, Casemiro has to basically stay in his own half, and Bruno/Mount have to get closer to him. The coaching is all off imo, with Casemiro running beyond even Mount, Mount not then replacing him and Bruno being the agent of chaos that he is.
EtH needs to sort it out asap. I can see trying this, but it failed against Wolves with a manager who has been there about 1 minute.
I think its very difficult to say Mount wasn't one of the problems just purely on the amount of challenges he lost or pulled out of completely. That on its own was completely unacceptable regardless of what role he's played in, and in addition he was really poor (well, pointless) on the ball. I struggle to think of a single thing he did in 90 minutes to help the team, ad can think of endless things he did that caused us problems. Some of it made a lot worse by the terrible system we played, granted.
The worrying thing is this is o Mount always plays for England and whenever I've watched him at Chelsea, so I'm completely lost as to what the plan is from ETH. None of the midfield 3 are going to magically change the type of player the are and all 3 would have to for it to even have a chance to not be a disaster. The other two you can keep where they are if you replace Mount with an actual midfielder. Mont only fits in our midfield as a sub standard stand in for Fernandes.
Agree with most of it. I still think ETH is a great manager but I'm worried for his tenure now.
I am also not surprised how bad Mount was. That's how he's been this preseason. What happened today has been happening all preseason.
All we needed to do was get an Eriksen with legs and here we are without a midfield. Sigh.
I'm pretty much lost on how ETH has gone from signing two midfielders last season and then playing them in every single game until one died and the other kept getting sent off (which uncoincidentally coincided with us becoming a bit rubbish), to coming to the conclusion we can just not have a midfield.
I want to give Mount a chance but I can't work out why we signed him. If it was for this he's going to bomb spectacularly because he's being asked to do something he obviously can't do. To me he's another option for the front 3 or a stand in for Bruno. Otherwise its just ETH creating a massive problem of his own making.