Tactically, Ivan Leko is right. I say that as a colleague. Club Brugge keep winning, and their coach is worried. In an interview with Het Nieuwsblad, he says his team has been “playing with fire” for a few weeks. Lokeren, RC Lens, STVV: three games that set off the alarm for him. Bruges got away with it every time, and in his view they can’t keep counting on that.
Me, I hear the alarm every Sunday at three o’clock. It’s called pitch 2. We lead, we drop deep, the slope does the rest.
But what struck me was what came next. After the fine performance against Inter Milan, he finds it harder and harder to keep his young players sharp, because the compliments don’t help. “Now everyone is throwing flowers at us and we’re top, when we really aren’t yet,” he said. I know the feeling. We won two games in a row in September, and the clubhouse bar put the team photo up next to the price list. The following Sunday my right-back turned up with new boots and a haircut. He lost the ball in the second minute. The club delegate (the volunteer who keeps the team sheets) wrote it in his folder, on the page marked “compliments”.
Leko wants to see the Club of the second half against Aston Villa, Inter and Lens again. “We have to hold on to that motivation and hunger,” he said. I run that on Tuesday. When we’ve got eleven, that is. I took the photo down from the clubhouse bar this Monday. The collective first.
A team photo in the clubhouse bar in September. In 1980, you waited until All Saints at the very least.
He also says prizes aren’t handed out in October or November, but in April or May. For us, that’s the end-of-season promotion round. And that stability hasn’t been reached, that there is plenty of room to improve. A flat pitch away, mind you: that’s exactly my pre-season speech.
It’s true, we checked: VoetbalPrimeur.be.
