Tottenham Hotspur central defender Davinson Sánchez has endured a lot of criticism at his club, and now the critics are beginning to surface back home with the Colombia national team.
Former Colombian manager, Jorge Luis Pinto, was the guest on ESPN F90 (via AS). The 68-year-old spoke about the Colombian National Team and the balance concerning the squad’s performance in this month’s FIFA World Cup Qualifying triple fixtures.
Pinto was critical in several points with Reinaldo Rueda’s team, including the defensive aspect, pointing primarily towards Sánchez.
“Four years ago, I told my son, who loves football, Davinson is not a central defender for the Colombian National Team. With all the respect that Davinson deserves, he is a healthy, correct, hard-working man and everything. Still, he does not have the talent, the playing time, all those details that a center-back needs,” Pinto said.
The former Colombian tactician continued with his opinion on the Tottenham defender and explained the shortcomings he sees in tactical and technical terms. Pinto states that Rueda doesn’t have a good concept of the player; he believes that Sánchez does not fit into a collective system.
” The playing time, the game intent management, the backup management, the defensive breaks, the crash impact that sometimes you can’t be that aggressive. Davinson is an extraordinary human being, as the guys have told me, but it lacks that slow, balanced handling of the game action, knowing how to correspond to the line of four,” Pinto said.
“I have said that the line of 4 is a collective system, it is not an individual action, it is a system of 4 and with the 6 or 8 player midfielders, and Davinson lacks that combination, that collective understanding.”
Pinto stated that Colombia looked better with the Carlos Cuesta-Oscar Murillo pair than with Davinson and Yerry Mina, regular starters since the 2018 World Cup in Russia.