Perhaps you should read up on Witsel, as he has attracted the attention of some of the biggest clubs in Europe. My point and maybe it's in the wrong thread, is that the player we should look to have cover for is Dembele not Dier. Witsel can provide genuine competition if not even play alongside Dembele if needed. The concern for a player to cover Dier isn't as urgent, as Verts started as a DM, Wimmer may well be ok as well, so yes Witsel is the type of player I think we should be looking at, someone who can cover Dembele.
Griffiths goal tally this year is quite remarkable when you consider how poor the Celtic team was under Deila.
Christ sake's, Zokora wasn't poor because he couldn't pass, he was poor because he couldn't read the game, and was always caught out of position. Generally he was about as defensively useful as the Maginot Line.
Blimey you talk a lot of rubbish.
Rubbish. That's why heat maps only tell part of the story. Dier very rarely breaks beyond the ball. Whereas with the likes of Dembele, Mason and Bentaleb all do because it is part of their strengths, The problem with Mason and Bentaleb is that neither one really wants to sit, it's not natural to them, whereas it is to Dier.
He had little control of the move to Zenit because of third party ownership and the likes of Jorge Mendes. Ill advised as a naive kid, but doesn't make him a bad player.
You clearly want a work horse like Wanyamarama, fair do's, but I think we're in a position to sign better players than him.
Why are people so concerned about backup for Dier? Shirley Dembele is the position we need to be concerned about, as we have potential cover for Dier i.e. Wimmer or Verts. The last two games showed us how important Demebele is, as well as the stats of coarse.
I think Dendocker is exactly as poor at passing as any other alternative for the Dier role. And truth is, we need one extremely good destroyer and one good passer in the CM2, not to guys who are equally average at everything.
Lord knows I'm a big believer in stats about pass accuracy, but in this specific case, that stat isn't really showing us any info beyond the fact that both players have equally high (or in my view equally low) pass accuracy. When we talk about "a good passer" to me, that is about far more than only the accuracy. A good passer needs to not only have accurate passes, but also incisive, chance creating passes. That's what both Dier and Wanyama are equally not good at. Now, if your point is that neither Dier nor Wanyama is specifically good passers, you are of course very correct. But there are more factors to that than only the accuracy in %. Not that the passing really matters for this position in the squad (see above).
Ehm ... not sure if you are serious? We could arguably do with two new different CMs, but in our entire squad, only Dier can do what Dier does. We have nobody else who can come close to do the job Dier solved this season. We may maybe have somebody who can slot in for Dembele. Maybe. But not at all for Dier.
