You have the same problem I do, when you aren’t sure what you should do, you tsurugi. It’s what I do when I auto-pilot, normal into tsurugi, tsurugi heavy approaches, etc.
I’ve started picking up on players with a cadence. And by cadence I mean, an identifiable pattern to their playstyle. For makoto players, this revolves around how they approach mostly. In the neutral, many intermediate maks will almost always use 1 style of approach repeatedly. And they will do it at regular intervals. This is an interesting quirk, because most newer maks don’t do this. They’re less rigid and much harder to predict. They also rely more heavily on just raw dashing which is much harder to react to than jumps, tsurugis, or focus dashes.
I played a really good Cody once and I was doing well against him, but eventually he started standing at a certain distance, probably about 2/3 screen away from me and throwing tons of buffered jabs. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get in. After losing a lot he left and I thought about the matches later and realized I could have closed the gap slightly then used a forward moving normal to fish for a counter hit. But since I’m so used to using either dashes or tsurugis to get in, it didn’t occur to me.
You tend to rely on tsurugi or dash, moreso tsurugi. I didn’t see you use forward moving normals, empty jumps, walking, or v-tsurugi. And you didn’t really poke much in the Rose matches. So for your opponent, that makes things much more simple to deal with.
This Rose caught on to when and how you approach and just started throwing stuff out, sometimes fairly punishable stuff, and you got hit. Watch the replays again, and look at what happened when you stood still for a second and focused on a reactionary ground game vs an aggressive approach. I remember you whiff punishing on at least three different occasions. Sweep, cr. lk, and st. mp are the most viable ground normals in this matchup. Cr. lk can pre-emptively stuff slides.Your whiff punishes had the potential to heavily swing the match in your favor, but the rose either backdashed or mashed a reversal and you were back into the neutral.
Boiled down, you have the same problems vs rose many players have, getting in and staying in. My advice is to focus a bit more on ground game and whiff punishing. This will vary your approach and make you less predictable, alter that cadence brah. Think more about when and how you approach. Sometimes, it’s best to go in after a whiffed move…say when the rose opened up with sweep. If you’d dashed you could have at least gotten some corner push and perhaps even a karakusa. I feel like you didn’t give the Rose time to show you how he plays in the neutral. You were too concerned about how you were going to approach and the Rose just kept punishing you for being too reckless.
Now for staying in. In pressure, your cadence is almost always 1 or 2 normals then tsurugi. Think about what to do instead of tsurugi. Try doing normal x 2 into kara throw. You have to establish that throw game to get the most out of IATs. Normal x 2 wait lets you see how the player reacts. Occasionally you’ll make them whiff a punishable move. Your biggest opportunities came after hayates, so work on your post hayate mix-ups and look into how to punish Rose’s backdash. Safe jump OS throw is really low risk if you don’t want to gamble on guessing between backdash or reversal ex spiral. You can OS ex fuki for backdash too (thanks vryu).
Hope the wall of text is helpful man, keep at it, rose can be really frustrating.
(I’m excited for the feedback) Thanks for the insight.
Love you.