Quote Originally Posted by bingo70 View Post
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I think it’s quite easy to defend well if that’s all you want to do and abandon any attempts to get forward. Similarly it’s easy to play attacking football if you don’t concern yourself with the defensive side (see his comments after the Celtic game they got pumped in recently).

When he manages to get his team to do both they’ll maybe be able to compete with the top 6 big boys.
That’s it in a nutshell. Any team can just dig in and hope they get to penalties, most often it doesn’t work though. You need to have some ambition to win the match - he was hoping to get it to penalties where it’s a lottery, don’t be gaslit into thinking getting to penalties equals “Hearts would have won”.

It’s just as likely that Aberdeen would have won on penalties.

Packing the defence and trying to defend is a routine training drill that every team does - nothing Hearts did yesterday was particularly tactically smart or revolutionary, they forced Aberdeen wide and defended their box, and were grateful Aberdeen were slow and wasteful with their play.

They did it well, but if you’re not bothered about having a go yourself then it’s not really worth it. Their fans should be looking back on that game furious that they’ve not really had a go at Aberdeen at 10 v 11. That’s not an insurmountable disadvantage that necessitated giving up any attacking threat they had.

Critchley 100% shat the bed when he opted to play for penalties, there was no faith in his team that they could compete with Aberdeen in open play.