Royal Antwerp FC lost twice without a chance to Union SG in the competition. According to analyst Patrick Goots, it must learn the necessary lessons from this towards the cup final.
Royal Antwerp FC was defeated 4-1 and 3-0 by Union SG in the last two competitions. The two teams will meet again next Thursday, but this time in the final of the Croky.
For analyst Patrick Goots it is already clear what The Great Old is not allowed to do: play long balls towards Janssen, Ekkelenkamp and Balikwisha. It was an attempt by trainer Mark van Bommel, but it yielded nothing.
“A strategy to utilize the space behind the Union defense – where there are some possibilities,” Goots notes in Gazet van Antwerpen. “Only Antwerp lost 95 percent of the aerial duels against the Brussels towers, so it was not time to play football at all.”
Technical execution
According to Goots, you cannot blame the attackers for that, even Alderweireld had a hard time when he was sent forward in the first leg. But in the cup final things will simply have to be done differently to get the balls to the front.
“Antwerp will have to find the spaces at Union in a different way. The technical implementation, to which Van Bommel already referred, must then be one hundred percent correct. It has now been less than optimal twice. We saw too many bad passes from Antwerp, which meant that we had to compete with every ball.”
