The player himself was well aware of this. Tillman remained self-critical throughout his first six months at Leverkusen, particularly emphasising this after what was arguably his best performance in a Bayer 04 shirt during the 3-0 Champions League victory over Villarreal at the end of January.<\/p>\n
“Personally, I think I could have done more; I expect more of myself too,” he said after his brace against the Spanish side.
\nSo why has he not yet delivered consistently good performances in Leverkusen? “I don’t know,” Tillman admitted, before outlining the issue: “I often find myself in the right space, but I just don’t receive the ball as often as I’d like. I’m not here to point fingers; we’re a team. My job is to show up in the right spots, and if the ball comes, great. If not, I keep going.”<\/p>\n
Yet his performances remained inconsistent; subsequent victories were fewer than before. One reason may be that Hjulmand did not deploy him in his preferred role as a left-sided central midfielder in a 4-3-3, instead using him as a deep-lying striker. “We’ve talked about it. He’s a second striker. Malik has to run into that space,” Hjulmand explained.<\/p>\n
Despite that performance, Tillman scored only three more goals and never recaptured his early-season form. Under Hjulmand, he lost his place in the starting XI during the final stretch, appearing as a late substitute in six of the last seven Bundesliga matches.<\/p>\n
Already in the spring, Tillman is said to have been frustrated by internal communication at Bayer and to have openly raised this with sporting director Simon Rolfes. The feeling of not being properly integrated into the group of key players was said to have reinforced his desire to leave even back then.<\/p>\n
It now looks as though Tillman and Leverkusen will part ways after only one season. A final twist remains possible, however, as Bayer is widely expected to replace Hjulmand before the new campaign. Oliver Glasner and Andoni Iraola have been linked; sources claim Glasner is Rolfes’ preferred candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The player himself was well aware of this. Tillman remained self-critical throughout his first six months at Leverkusen,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21161],"tags":[21182,846,25948,25950,20758,25949,25947,174,3354],"class_list":["post-24709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bayer","tag-bayer","tag-bundesliga","tag-e-ben-seghir","tag-e-fernandez","tag-fulham","tag-l-bade","tag-m-tillman","tag-premier-league","tag-transfers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}