New cold shower for Anderlecht. After losing in the Cup final against Ghent, the Mauves turned the other cheek by losing the Brussels derby against Union Saint-Gilloise. A defeat which hardly suffers from any dispute as Sporting seemed without ideas and overwhelmed by Saint-Gillois already past masters in… cunning.
This is in any case what filtered from Vincent Kompany’s speech. If the Mauves coach clearly admitted, at the microphone of Eleven Sports, that the Union was superior during the entire meeting, he also confided that it was on experience that the Saint-Gillois used his Purple babies: “They were better than us, especially in the way they played game within game. They are deceitful, I will put it like that. When the ball is on the ground, they act as if they were holding their ankle when they are already thinking of going deep. These are things related to experience but which are important at this level. When you see the first goal, that’s what best sums up the Union. We knew it but they do it better than anyone. We knew it but we were never able to react. I can’t blame them, on the contrary, everything they did was just smarter than us. I know Union won’t always be seen as favourites, but looking at how they behave, it’s no coincidence that they are where they are. Before the first game of the season, I had already seen that they were a formidable team.”
Former defender, Kompany quickly understood the inclinations of the Unionists: “”When you’ve played football and you see Vanzeir playing with his socks on the sideline, you know he’s setting a trap. With experience, with vice, you know that he is not putting his socks back on but that he is preparing a counter. Same, when the goalkeeper, Moris, puts the ball on the ground, when he lowers his head, you know he is already looking deep. This is what makes the Union strong.”
A roundabout way of complimenting the cunning and vice of the opponent to forget or conceal the few defensive shortcomings which the Mauves showed during the meeting?