AvatarX wrote:- Gomez. I think he doesn't feel the competition after a very good year and he doesn't try enough. He lost the ball many times inside the box and he should have been subbed in the last minutes for Petersen or Olic.
I didn't think he was as bad as people made him out to be some time ago, and I don't think he's as good as other people have been making him out to be lately. He's scored truckloads of goals for us last season, with his left, with his right and with his head. He was on fire, and I give him credit for scoring in big matches, for doing everything to win and for carrying us when no one out of our team seemed to be capable of pushing the ball over the line. But every attacker's streak ends, and there are phases when nothing seems to be going for you and the ball just doesn't want to travel in. I ask this question, of what value is he for us then? I do acknowledge that he's made a significant step forward last season in that regard, specifically in cooperating with his teammates but there's still a lot he needs to work on. Ball-control, first touch, short-range passing are all improvable technical areas for him. He seems very clumsy in his ball-handling at times, you rarely see him contributing in effective combinations, outside of the box he usually just slows down our play. We're talking about criticizing on a very high level here for a guy who has scored 28 goals in 32 BL-games and 8 goals in 8 CL-games, but there is still plenty of room for improvement for him, particularly when he’s not scoring.
One problem of ours that hasn't been picked out as a central theme here is the lack of creativity down the middle, or at least I haven't seen it. Gomez, as pointed out above, can't provide that for us. Muller is simply not an offensive-midfielder of Ozil's type for example and he can't build up play from deep, he's a shadow-attacker that plays off of the central striker up front and that's what he's great at. Or as a winger as shown with Germany, but not as a modern #10. Schweinsteiger has been chasing his form all last season and has been playing well below par since the World-Cup, especially in last season's Ruckrunde. While Gustavo still needs time to grow into that role, at Hoffenheim he was playing in a counter-attacking system with quick vertical football, that's not possible at Bayern most of the time. Our wings usually get double or even triple teamed, you’re logically gonna get more space down the middle as a result of that. The attacking trio behind Gomez consists of flexible players, who can all cover all of those 3 positions, I think rotation is the key here and we're not getting the most out of that.
These are things I've monitored during last season and were confirmed last night against Hamburg. It's still early to make final judgements and we should be patient, the team just needs more training time. If they continue playing like this in 2 weeks time, then we'll have something to worry about.