FromTheLane
New Member
- Jul 3, 2008
- 214
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:clap: Top post mate...Pienaar is a quality quality player, I cant believe people on here are against signing him. Evertything that Everton do well goes through him and Baines down their left hand side, them 2 have a great little partnership. I think both he and Parker would improve the squad massively
Yeah exactly, it really irritates me when people pidgeon hole players (and even managers) into lazy tabloid-driven characterisations and stereotypes without actually looking at a body of evidence with a critical eye as a basis from which to build an opinion.
Anyone who watches Premiership football with an engaged and objective eye can see quite clearly that Parker and Pienaar are amongst the best midfielders in the league and are respectively the mainstays of their sides.
Watching Liverpool last night was very interesting and provided an excellent illustration of the value of a having player such as Pienaar. The contrast between the heavy involvement of Liverpool's wide players and Downing's peripheral contribution seemed to demonstrate the increasing trend towards very compact midfields whose creative players play 'in to out', and the relative demise of the touchline hugging, non-roaming winger. Time and again Maxi in particular came in to receive the ball, and this allowed Liverpool to retain possession much more convincingly and with greater assurance than Villa, who were always looking to work the ball wide to Albrighton and Downing, and as a result saw it intercepted more often than not. The secondary effect of this was that Liverpool were harder to break down as they effectively had two more men in the centre of the park when they needed to harry, despite playing with two strikers.
Contrary to popular belief we have not played very smartly at a lot of points this year and are actually very easy to 'play through' in midfield because of the fact that, with Modric roaming and Bale and Lennon so wide, we often only have one man really in an area of the pitch where other teams have three or sometimes four. This was particularly apparent against Arsenal in the first half, and I am convinced that a model closer to Arsenal's where we are tight in midfield with the full backs (Bale being one of them) providing the width is the way forward. It is notable and illustrative that our best defensive record in recent years came when we had Modric on the left.
To do this though you obviously need the midfielders to be very high energy, and more than anything that is why Kranjcar doesn't really fit into the scheme if Harry sees things as I do, with us playing a sort of 3-4-3 similar to Barca's when we have the ball.