Pinging - an adjective that can never honestly be applied to our passing. I was wondering when somebody else was going to comment on the way we pass. The delay typically takes two forms. First, too often, we mentally take forever to make the obvious pass - indicates a stunning lack of awareness. Second we push the ball instead of pinging it - is this just lazy or a lack of technique.
And then, compounding the problem, and I'm not talking about passes over distance, quite often what should be a crisp firm pass on the carpet ends up coming into the player on a bounce or off the ground. This makes the life of the player receiving the ball unnecessarily difficult and limits their options somewhat - a clever player can receive a good pass and be off with the ball in one motion - just thinking back Ronnie Rees could do this, one touch and he'd be gone. How, I wonder, would these players have functioned on the pitches we played on decades ago, where grass disappeared from the middle of the park by Christmas and carpet was a word reserved for a bowling green.
I don't see these problems in the U-23 and U-21 matches that I have watched; at least they don't manifest so clearly.
Whatever is going on in training ... there are clearly deficiencies. It would be interesting to look at video from matches under Martinez, Sousa, Rogers and Laudrup to compare. We would see L1 to Prem examples for comparison.