Every report that I've read has been very explicit about using the man's full name to avoid confusion. Why am I not surprised that The Scum is an exception?
What an awful experience for Louis Saha, it must be extremely unpleasant to read his name misrepresented by such a scabby newspaper.
Too much money too early? Hindsight is wonderful, but his move to Everton was always a gamble as you don’t sign a hopelessly out of form player to get you out of a relegation battle.
Full name in : 1. any headlines 2. the first mention of the person in the body of the article (surname suffices thereafter in the article unless another person with the same surname is also mentioned) Not even as if we are in days of print yore where every word took up "real estate" + cost ink on the final page.
Good to see Kieran McKenna doing well at Ipswich. He did a good job last season and they’ve made a great start. Good luck to him as that is going to be a tough league to get out of.
Tragic waste of talent. One of the most gifted young players of a generation, a career lost in less than 8 years. Does anyone really know what went wrong? He seemed to have a wise counsel (Dier) as his best buddy and despite a disrupted upbringing seemed to be a quite level headed lad. Really painful to see his demise. Quite the opposite of my feelings for Ndombele - a man with exceptional talent but brainless.
I think it's a combination of three factors i.) Rushing him back from injury far too often until the injuries caught up with him and blunted his edge, similar to what happened with Fernando Torres ii.) Ever since Dembele fell apart we were pushed deeper, so we didn't create pockets of space for him to exploit anything like we were between 2015-7 iii.) Just like with Poch, it honestly looked like the CL final loss broke him and he never recovered While a player can recover from one of those factors - barring Harry Winks, as the second one of that list disappearing was enough to put his career in tailspin - when you combine any of those it's hard to get back to anything other than brief glimpses of what you were
Eriksen and Dembele made him look better than he was in my opinion, that’s not to say he’s a bad player but I think they made him look world class, such was their quality. That and the fact I don’t think he was 100% committed to football for a large spell, we even saw on the Amazon doc that Jose called him a lazy trainer.
He did not maintain the levels of his first two seasons, nor adapt to playing in the inferior teams of the two seasons following 2018-19. Contrast with Kane and Son on both of the above, and you see how attitude (sheer will) and application can trump precocious talent.
He was a lot more than 'not a bad player', DH and while those two exceptional players elevated him (and all those around them), his talent from 17-22 was indisputable. The lack of commitment is the key and maybe HBIC's reasoning is on the money. Whatever the reason, it's a sad waste!
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/aug/17/dilan-markanday-leads-way-blackburn-inclusion-drive Interesting article here with a big focus on Dilan Markanday
One other thing that has to be said is that, during the prime of Poch's tenure, our system allowed Dele to thrive as a second striker whether we were playing 4231 or 3421 as the Wanyama/Dembele pivot was not only designed to open up pockets of space for Dele to nip into but also screen Toby for when he wanted to hit one of those 60+ yard balls up to Dele Once we started getting pushed back because Dembele and Wanyama were physically declining that nullified Dele because we weren't creating the pockets of space nor was Toby screened for those passes, and the Air Raid tactics of 2018-19 weren't compensating for that However, it does have to be suggested that Poch may have been looking beyond Dele in the summer of 2019 considering Lo Celso played as a second striker at Betis so it's not unreasonable to assume he was signed as a two-in-one replacement for both Dele and Lamela - although that does beg the question why the hell we spent so much on a Dembele replacement who turned out to be a Stephane Dalmat replacement and never bothered to look for a Wanyama replacement
