Pulled of a couple of great saves yesterday, but his passing the ball out is poor and must frighten his own players at times.
That one time where he passed it straight to an Arsenal player *in the fudging box* was literal cardiac-arrest territory.
We really need to stop playing out from the back with Hugo. That just isn't his strength, and will never be - teams know this, and are pressuring him and the defense to ludicrous levels to get him to make mistakes, which he is making.
But that isn't his fault at all. Thinking about it, the requirements for elite goalies have evolved dramatically over the last ten years.
The basic, eternal element of goalkeeping is good shot-stopping. But by the time 2009 rolled around, command of your box had also become a big one, because of the way Van Der Sar handled his box and the way a young Joe Hart cleared people out of the way to get at the ball on set pieces.
Around 2012-ish (the time we signed Hugo), the big thing was having a fast goalkeeper able to sweep up behind a high defense, like Valdes at Barcelona. And we thought we were getting one of the best of the game in that with Hugo - and, credit to him, we got just that. A great shot-stopper, able to quickly get out of his box to close down and play a sweeper keeper.
However, around 2017/2018, the paradigm shifted again with the rise of Ederson and Allison - suddenly, it wasn't good enough to be a good shot stopper, to command your box and be quick off the line to sweep up. Now, you also needed to be an elite distributor - a good passer from deep, to evade the press and build from the back.
Hugo's just fallen short of that new marker of excellence for goalkeepers. To be fair, the vast majority of keepers have - just the way the game goes. But we can't try building up like Liverpool or City when Hugo is critically weak at that aspect - that's just inviting disaster.