He was SS behind Higauin, Mandzukic was left winger, who basically spent half the time hustling back, he never took Dybalas space or pushed him out to midfield as he is this season as our main CF. And again, MASSIVE difference between playing behind only Higauin (again, Mandzu was a conservative defensive left winger), to now having Mandzu in box and Ronaldo who is not a left winger but basically an all attack weapon who has freedom to go in out of the box as the team premier attacker. He has been pushed to midfield exactly because of this significant change in how we set up our attack, so how is this the same role as the SS role of last season?
Its not a coincidence he went from 32 goals last season to just 10 goals this season, clearly not the same role or approach.
And yeah Dybala isnt a good midfielder, you know why? Because he isnt a midfielder...
So we played like this:
---------------Higuain
---------------------------Dybala
Mandžukić------------------------------no one
?
It makes no sense. How is Bernardeschi in positions to take shots all the time?
He's not a midfielder, stop with that. He plays deeper than his first season and needs to move more and run and sacrifice more. But no one is saying he should still be scoring tons of goals. The criticism is he's offering nothing else, he's pouting, falling down, zero effort. That's on him.
If he was truly THAT good as people make him to be, he would be able to make a stamp on the game in other ways. Some of the best games he had were when he scored no goals but made tons of runs, dribblings, switching the play, orchestrating everything in the final third. He has the talent and has the ability to be so much more than just around the box player. He doesn't want to.
And he doesn't respond well to adversity. Last year he had that amazing start, Barcelona game came, media immediately made comparisons with Messi again because he was scoring so much. He had a horrible game, could barely get his shots to the GK and never went back rest of the year. Now Ronaldo comes and instead of using that as drive to prove himself he does the opposite.