Jan Boskamp and Wesley Sneijder do not understand that Noni Madueke was substituted for PSV in the second half. The analysts of RTL 7 see the right striker of the Eindhoven team as the player who could have decided the play-off match in the Champions League against Benfica (0-0) with an individual action.
Boskamp said he was shocked when Madueke was taken out for Yorbe Vertessen after seventy minutes. “I was shocked, because you have one player, Madueke, who has an action at home and can play a man out,” said Boskamp. “I’m not saying he played a world game, but he does have that action, and you suddenly lost that.”
Sneijder also thinks that Madueke should have remained standing. “Of course he was not in the game, but there was none,” said the record international / “Let him stand anyway. Or there must be something else with him, that he may have an injury, but he didn’t go there off that way.” Sneijder believes that PSV constantly did not play with ‘the right people in the right positions’. He saw Ibrahim Sangaré regularly play ‘at the center’, causing Eran Zahavi to drop back to midfield. “I think that’s a big failure of the trainer. He hasn’t been clear enough to keep the players in the positions. He can blame himself for that.”
Sneijder also believes that Schmidt ‘switched for the sake of switching’. “Madueke is a boy who can play fantastic football in a small space. Leave those twenty minutes, even if he has such an ankle. It’s about getting to the Champions League. I don’t care if he can’t go for two weeks play? That boy should have just stayed standing. And then you bring Vertessen, who just needs space behind the defense.”
The tactics that PSV used against Benfica’s team did not appeal to Sneijder. “They’re all in the crowd, in the funnel. And after the switches, they all didn’t know where to walk at all. It was as if Schmidt said: ‘Go in and find out.’ “I think Cody Gakpo has literally been on the side twice in the second half. For the rest he has only been in midfield, and then Gakpo is not in his power.”