If the 1 year deal was at his request then he'd probably have no problem with a pay as you play deal. Maybe he just thinks short term
That's what the chief scout stated on the record. And no, sharp was in training two weeks before the window opened. And Delap played on Jan 1st and extent of injury wasn't known until the 11th.
Delap trained a full season with Aguero I think he’s probably had as good a mentor as anyone. We thought he’d come in and score us a few important goals, then we realised we’d have to get him the ball first and realised that’s not in our capabilities so now we don’t play him.
We're excellent at stopping teams playing. A lot of that is down to the possession we keep. They can't hurt us if they don't have the ball. But let's be brutally honest - a lot of that possession is very safe. We don't dominate teams, we keep the ball a lot and occasionally create half chances or the rare clear cut chance when we eventually advance with it. It's not what I'd call domination at all, it's closer to us trying to 'control' the game. Domination would be using that possession to create gilt edge chances and ideally, put some of them away. Teams run 'at' us when they have possession and we sometimes deal with it, we sometimes don't. We don't really run 'at' teams to the same degree. We were better at it last night. When it comes to fluffing our chances, or looking clueless in attack etc, I chalk that up to the fact that we get into those situations so infrequently and therefore haven't had the time to gel, which is the opposite situation to say - how well we can now pass at the back or in the middle. It took time but it's easy to get time doing that - the opposition will largely allow us to do it because they're happier to let us have possession where it's not hurting them plus we have more numbers in deeper positions, naturally. If we can start getting teams on the back foot more often then we can improve. On Delap, he was great at creating those moments by himself, where the opposition actually looked rattled. As for last night, it could and probably should have been closer to 5-1 - it was certainly that sort of balance on quality chances. If we include Ömur's shot as a good chance then we need to add even more on for Leeds. I probably sound negative, but I've given it time and I just can't get along with Rosenior's 'A plan', purely because it's not entirely successful. In my opinion all it serves to do is stifle the opposition, but it stifles us as well in the process. The giveaway is the huge volume of low scoring games we have. My final gripe - whenever we concede there's always at least one player prior to kicking off again waving their arms downward - the 'keep things calm' gesture... **** that, we need a tempo injection the vast majority of the time and we're too casual. We need the opposite. Some of the better moments we've had this season in terms of looking threatening are late in games we've been trailing, but by then it's usually too late.
I wouldn’t have minded losing like we did yesterday if all the issues we displayed weren’t the same issues we show against teams at the other end of the table. That’s the only thing consistent about us. Pretty between both boxes, decent in the defensive box, terrible in the final third and penalty area. Leeds should’ve still won comfortably yesterday despite the way the game played out IMO.
Yeah I think that's about right. It frustrates me a bit when people say that games like Leicester and last night were much better and that we just need to play like that more often. I think it's actually not that dissimilar to our other performances, but because we're playing better sides our expectations are lower and we more readily accept that level of performance than we do against lesser sides. Ultimately, whoever we play, we rarely do our overall performance justice in the final third, and we quite consistently get a worse result than we should do from a game.
Agree with a lot of this. Disagree on the assessment of last night’s game. I thought we played well. The bit about the system stifling the opposition and us I think is spot on. I think we need to learn this as a club quickly if we are to make the next step.
Ultimately the 2 boxes are the most important parts of the game. Leeds were terrible between the boxes last night, partly down to our set up and press but they defended their penalty area with ease and looked like scoring most times they entered ours. I think we could get there but if we continue to play at the pace we do through the thirds we won’t see any improvement in the attacking. We have more than enough game changers to do it, we just don’t give them the platform to succeed.
Two good wingers need a proper centre forward and a drop off player. Connolly for me is a good drop off forward but he isn’t an out and out centre forward.
Another thought from last night. I keep seeing goals teams score against us and thinking, we would never score a goal like that. Obviously James from the halfway line, the second time this season that a player has nailed our net from halfway. We have some great players but I simply can't imagine us doing that. Byram's goal last night, ball goes up in the air and it was just pure desire to dominate Giles and bundle it in. He had no right really. Again, can't see us ever doing that for some reason; if the shoe was on the other foot it'd have been cleared without much opposition from us. There are loads of ways to score a goal as our opposition keep demonstrating but so many of them seem totally off the table to us. Even penalties, we seem to miss 50% of ours but for about 5 years now almost every single one against us has gone in. I think Ingram saved one against Cardiff last season, that was the exception. Set pieces we always talk about but it's an ongoing issue. We get loads of corners and free kicks and nothing, yet seemingly every **** team who comes to The Circle can go ahead from a bloody corner. We give plenty of airtime to talking about the system, but there has to be something else. Seems every team we play has this killer instinct in crucial moments, and we spectacularly don't.
We've actually scored quite a few from set pieces - or the subsequent play this season. Greaves' first against Huddersfield the most recent example I can think of.
