Much as I frequently question what goes on in training, it's not unreasonable to think that a certain amount of it will have been tailored towards the next game. The lineup will have been decided, players told who they should mark, situations worked through, etc. There's more to picking a team than naming eleven men, Alex Neil (probably) didn't decide who was playing Saturday morning. The team will have trained Friday, and that evening been preparing for the game in their usual fashion. Do you really drag the whole squad back to Colney, tell them to ignore the last couple of days and rush through a new plan in a couple of hours, a plan that you were only handed the opportunity to come up with an hour or so prior?
Secondly, Irvine worked alongside Neil. Neil was a strong personality, but if Irvine had completely different ideas you would imagine he would voice them to the manager. I cannot imagine Irvine toiled away under Neil, desperate to play Whittaker as a trequartista in the revolutionary brand of football he's been dreaming up.
Thirdly, how would you actually change the team given the current state of the squad?
- Neither goalkeeper has shone, we have a single LB, and the alternatives at RB have been widely criticised. There's something going on with Klose, and picking Bassong or Turner would be laughable. So the back 4 picks itself without any real decisions to be made.
- Moving into midfield, assuming you're going to stick with something reasonably standard, your central midfield has to be Tettey and Howson. Godfrey is our only other fit option, and if you're going to drop a youngster in you want to give him more than 18 hours notice. Nobody else is fit.
- You could play 2 out-and-out strikers and pair Jerome with Lafferty, but I imagine the amount of time they've played together or trained that combination is negligible. So it's Jerome plus 3 attacking midfielders. People have wanted Pritchard to get a chance and he did, it's just a shame circumstances forced him off early. Maddison is perhaps the only other player without regular minutes deserving a shot, but it's the same situation as Godfrey.
So given all of that, is it really too surprising that we got an "Alex Neil XI" from a man who helped prepare that team through the week?