Udinese old way: with Union Berlin is equal

In the starting eleven only players from last season lined up, Deulofeu leaves after a quarter of an hour. Nestorovski scored twice, Benkovic scored; some defensive amnesia favors the German comeback

LIENZ. No new from Udinese’s Austrian retreat. The bianconeri, in the first real test of the season with a Bundesliga team, Union Berlin, present themselves with a formation without new faces, score three goals and highlight ancient defects: as soon as the threshold of concentration falls, they collect goals. We are in the summer and therefore it is not surprising, but even these signals, good and not so good, will be used by Mr. Sottil to work on them.

This, it should be remembered, was a risky race. On Friday, the much-vaunted Turin had remedied a sharp 3-1 from Eintracht Frankfurt. Union Berlin is not the reigning Europa League champion like the opponents of the grenades, but they will play it in the next season and, compared to Pereyra and his teammates, they have ten more days of work in their legs. Yet the difference in preparation was seen only in the second part of the recovery.

Sottil, as we said, fielded a team very similar to that of Cioffi: Padelli between the posts, Becao, Nuytinck and Benkovic in defense, Soppy and Udogie on the outside lanes, Arslan, Walace and Makengo in the central package and Pereyra attacking midfielder behind Deulofeu. The Catalan, who immediately went close to scoring with a right-footed turn, raised the white flag after less than a quarter of an hour because he was hit hard by an opponent.

An excess of precaution on his part, but “Deu” is this: take it or leave it. In place of him came Nestorovski who had two balls on the left putting them both in the bottom of the bag.

Football is strange: the Macedonian was about to expire his contract and seemed destined to seek his fortune elsewhere (Lecce, Cagliari and Palermo the candidates) then surprisingly accepted the annual renewal.

Who knows that he will become a more useful player than he was in the previous three years in Udine, punctuated, among other things, by a serious knee injury.

Old-fashioned team, we said, form the same. For the moment, and the opposite would be strange, we have not seen anything new compared to the past. Sottil even deployed Deulofeu as the first striker with Pereyra as support.

Tucu lit up intermittently, but when Udinese did it they knew how to make themselves dangerous. The first goal, for example, was born from a verticalization of the Argentine for Makengo (already on the ball) able to trigger with a back assist the left of Nestorovski who before the break gave an encore on an assist from Soppy’s right lane.

The Frenchman, also for his physical constitution, seemed more on the ball than Udogie, distracted in the action that led to Union Berlin’s 3-3. All the goals scored by Udinese seemed avoidable: the first of Khedira (brother of the former Juventus player Sami present in the stands), was born from a lineout, the second from a lack of aggression by Benkovic who immediately redeemed himself by going to gore a punishment from Arslan.

Here, if it is true, as Sottil said, that the team was tactically ordered, at the level of the defensive department we can and must do better.

This is also why a possible sale of Becao would be more worrying than that of Walace. But these are choices that belong only to Gino Pozzo.