Gent beat Anderlecht 4-0. After the match, Filip Joos told Sporza (the Flemish public broadcaster’s sports site): “I think Bruno sometimes pulls 11 names out of a bag of 20 players. He has too many players in the same range and there are no peaks in the team.” Silly question, but… which bag?
I opened my notebook at the “line-up” tab. In basketball, you pick five starters. I have never seen a bag, I looked. Here, according to the article, the Anderlecht coach’s starting line-up keeps changing, and that stops automatisms from forming. So the bag is an image. Fine. But the image says twenty players for eleven places. I did the sum on the 7:32 train: nine are left in the bag every match.
Second question: “no peaks”. I first thought of a flat pitch. I’m told it means nobody stands out. Filip Joos also said that Gent knows what it is, what it can do and what it wants, and that Anderlecht doesn’t know yet. I noted down the three verbs. Gent has all three.
The same Filip Joos had predicted, after about ten minutes, a 0-3 win for Anderlecht in the WhatsApp group of the podcast 90 minutes. At the live show in Mechelen, people laughed. He explains that after eleven minutes, Anderlecht were playing well and Gent were doing nothing. Steven Defour told Sporza he never had the impression that Gent were afraid of Anderlecht.
A bag is a luxury. My folder does the same job, and it closes.
Sam Kerkhofs, for his part, mentions the rehabilitation of Mario Stroeykens and Adriano Bertaccini, whom sporting director Antoine Sibierski had pointed out as players who should leave. So they came out of the bag, then went back in. I checked, and actually nobody knows how you put someone back in a bag.
Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
It’s true, we checked: Sporza.
