Depends on how you define success. If Pog launches on the Cat 2 and gets a group with him that works together he's always gonna win that sprint and he can reduce the pool of contenders really easily.
Really don't think he would have found a group willing to work together though. That only works if the attack is hard enough and the group sufficiently small but the peloton was not thinned out enough to achieve that. I think an attack by someone like Yates, perhaps on the penultimate climb, was always more likely anyway, but the way the race went Visma, RB and Ineos simply would have buitlt a train against which Yates wouldn't have had a chance. They simply needed to reduce the peloton more than they did but were not willing/able to do so.
I think the main problem for UAE was that they clearly wanted to keep all of Yates, Almeida and Ayuso in the peloton which already makes me think they probably should have sent a pure mountain dom instead of one of them.
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