Overall it was a solid season, I’m looking forward to next season.
There are a lot of loaned out players where you probably can’t and won’t buy one. I’m curious to see whether those in charge have the courage to rely on more young, home-grown plants.
A few are currently close.
Calling 32 solid points at this point is interesting.
It’s been a scary season. Especially because of the squad planning beforehand… and it looks like you haven’t learned anything from that if you’re now thinking about loaning Milosovic again instead of looking at who to sign permanently.
The squad was certainly capable of more than 32 points at that point… the Europe nonsense was of course silly from the start. But being stuck in the relegation battle like that wasn’t exactly what you could expect… a gray mouse midfield with a distance to the bottom would have been “solid” and also what you could expect… that wasn’t the case.
Horst Steffen was unfortunately a mistake. We’ll see if Thioune gets better… he didn’t exactly “save” us because we don’t play any better under him. However, he positions himself a little better and, above all, stays true to his position… Steffen has experimented too much.
What I don’t like about Thioune at the moment is that he doesn’t rely enough on his own young talent on the offensive. Covic and Musah no longer have a chance. And Mbangula is no longer really used either. All 3 but players who should actually be important for the coming season and are currently left out.
You would have to use the next 3 games to use players who will also wear green and white next season… Puertas and Milosovic can go on the bench if you can give others time who urgently need them.
I’m also curious how Thioune wants to play in the future. Today, for example, we played without a winger. He switches back and forth between 4-3-3 and 3-4-2-1. I think a 3-4-3 wouldn’t be bad with the players we have… three-man chain + double 6 and well-manned wings. We actually have the players for that, what’s missing is the 9th.
I didn’t like the 4-man chain at the back, but the defense as well as other parts of the team will probably look fundamentally different next season… Coulibaly will probably be unstoppable, Friedl is fed up with the relegation battle, Stage shows that he has a higher calling… whether we can keep him is very questionable. You shouldn’t extend it with Weiser, it doesn’t make sense, but you haven’t heard anything about it either, so I think you should let the working paper expire…
Let’s see what Thioune wants… it will be important to plan the squad accordingly, and of course we should have started doing that long ago, but at the very latest now that it is clear that we are playing in the first league.
It remains to be seen whether Thioune will suit us better overall than Horst Steffen… but I think that we will perform similarly under Horst Steffen as we do now with Thioune. In any case, I didn’t see any real “effect” from it. However, I have to say that Thioune seems somehow… more committed to me? With Horst Steffen I often had the impression that he didn’t really care. Which was definitely not the case, but it felt like it was.
Hopefully we won’t be heading towards relegation next season… but given the prospect of the transfer summer, we have to assume that we have a lot of gaps to fill in the squad. This has to be a really good transfer summer for us otherwise it will be a really difficult season. Because next season there will definitely not be three teams that will score less than 30 points.
