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Martinelli and Ødegaard’s attacking data this year is a sight for sore eyes. The captain 0.13 xA per 90….There are average players in dead teams putting up better numbers. Saka’s has reduced too but his creative numbers are towards the top. Trossard needs to be starting every game, he is the best performing attacker after Bukayo.
Martinelli has to work on his crossing, that’s the main difference between him and Saka right now. He can get past his defender with ease but his crosses are always too wild whereas Saka has at least 3-4 perfect dinks per game.
IDK what happened with Odegaard he looks a shell of himself
While I agree with what you said about Martinelli needing to work on his crossing,part of the blame has to go our CFs as well.For example,in our last UCL game Martinelli was rinsing that RB and putting in crosses; while some of them weren’t that great they were made to look even worse from by the lack of movement in the box.Even in our last match,I remember Martinelli looking up and then putting in a cross and no one in the box made any particular movement at all,which made the cross look really bad while it was a pretty good one.I even remember Martinelli giving a perplexed," the fuck you guys doing" kind of look after that.I’m not sure about the timing of this but think it was in the first half.
None of our attackers aren’t that tall except Havertz,but there has to be better movement imo.I saw Kai saying in his post match interview how Ode and Saka are always looking for him with their crosses from the right( don’t remember the exact words,but it was something along these lines).While Saka is better at crossing than Martinelli is,he has the added advantage that his natural arc/area of crossing generally has someone like Kai on the receiving end,who has natural height advantage,and at the same time has much better movement as compared to Jesus/Eddie.If Martinelli is going to keep spamming crosses from the left,we need better movement from from our forwards to make the most of them.Kai given his position cannot possibly get on the end of Martinelli"s crosses,but maybe White can make some late runs/get into those areas a bit more to create more threats.
TLDR: Martinelli has to improve his crossing,but his crossing is made to look even worse by the lack of good movement from the forwards.
I agree, Jesus and Nketiah leave a lot to be desired but I will say that Martinelli also just doesn’t look up. It’s his one fatal flaw, he’s doing all this great stuff with his head down and then gets pushed to the corner because the pass never comes at the right time.