Profondo Rosso
Well-Known Member
All to inconsistent? Oh.. so that's how we made the play offs with them in the midfield for the majority of the season..
As I've said before, TS. We made the play-offs that season because of our fantastic defence, not because of our midfield or attack. We didn't score that many goals when we made the play-offs before, we made them because we conceded so few. You're judging what they've achieved as part of a team, not what they've achieved as an individual. Darren Fletcher and Michael Carrick have been part of several league title winning sides, it doesn't make them two of the best players in the PL. I think most would agree they're very average PL players.
Nugent has made a fair tally of goals at this level on a number of ocassions - whether you care to consider him as being prolific or not is up to you but the ability is there. He has scored again today but we have been on the end of another bad result.
Exactly, a fair tally. Exactly like Fryatt and Waghorn in 09/10. I bet you'll find Nugent has never scored more goals per minute in a season than Fryatt and Waghorn did that season and if he has, he did it in one season and it's barely by much more. That's what I keep saying, I've never said I think these players are shit, just average. Nugent is a decent player at this level who works hard, but he's certainly not a great player or one of the best strikers in the league, he's never going to be a 20 goal a season striker and he's clearly not a great creative striker either.
Mills, for all his error prone inconsistancy was still a big part of a Reading side that made the play off final last season and was always in and around the play offs leading up to that.
See above. (And from what I remember Reading were mid-table all season, but then won like 8 or 9 games in a row right at the end of the season to make them).
Fernandes isn't a creative player, he is a player like Abe who is a combative energetic ball winner, we knew this when we signed him - so why are you pointing out this as a weakness in his game? Do all our players have to be perfect at everything for you to be happy? Does this mean Kasper Schmeichel is crap because he can't finish for shit?I'm not going to consistantly argue with you about what the problem is with our season.
Abe, a combative energetic ball winner? Bloody hell! You've been watching a different player to me. I see Abe as a lightweight midfielder who is a good reader of the game.
I'm not pointing out it as a weakness at all. I'm saying that people keep complaining about our lack of creativity in midfield and then thinking Fernandes, Abe or Johnson are going to be the answer, but they aren't at all. We have no creative midfield players in the squad and just have a load of box to box players.
Back to the point you made about Brown and his leadership qualities, it's obvious Pearson recognises this as a problem. We know for a fact he has told Bamba he'd like him to be more vocal, this isn't really a question of ability but one of organisation - as I keep alluding to!
But it is both of those things! It is a question of organisation, but that is in itself a question of ability. Organisation, positioning intellegence and defensive disciplines are all individual skills. They are not something a manager can just tell any old player to do and they will do it like robots.
If you've ever played football, TS, you'll know that it's a game made of hundreds of individual decisions, it is not, like some people who are obsessed with formation seem to think, all about some tactics and a manager telling his players where to go like chess pieces. Chess is a game of patterns and limited fixed moves which are made at a certain time, football is not. There are too many variables, too many different situations throughout a football match, too many different ares as to where the ball and a players team-mates are at any given moment.
A manager can tell a player to do what he likes, he can't just make a player concentrate better for the full 90 minutes, he can't just make a player a more intelligent player at positioning and organising, he can't just make a player better at reading the game and making the correct decisions based on what is going on in that game at any given moment.
Wayne Brown had all those qualities in abundance, Sol Bamba does not. They're not just going to get these because the manager tells them to. To have a properly organised defence, you not only need a manager who can organise them, but you also need the players who can recognise the game as it unfolds and organise themselves and help organise their team-mates as each individual game's uniqueness plays out.
Defensive organisation is as much a case of ability as a defender's ability to win balls in the air or to tackle is and it's one ability our current central defenders all severely lack.
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