Having a ridiculously poor midfielder in Jones playing with Carrick just shows that we don't need some big name in CM. We don't lack creativity, Anderson, Cleverley and Carrick are plenty creative enough. The problem was highlighted against Blackburn in two ways I think. Firstly there was noone to game the by the scruff of the neck, you could see this because of the amount of space that their midfielders had to play in. Now I don't know if that's how SAF tells the players to play i.e. sit back but it's a dangerous ploy because we give the opposition a lot of chances when we have done that at home. In fact, apart from Spurs and Newcastle, I can't think of many other teams that genuinely didn't look like scoring a few goals when they came here. The way that Jones and Carrick combined in West London recently shows that we didn't even need a world class DM to close down their midfield and make them make mistakes. Imagine what we could do with a fit Owen Hargreaves and Anderson/Cleverley partnership? Secondly, when teams get 5 or 6 players in central defence we find it incredibly hard to break them down through the centre. That is logical because more players will mean less space. So we go out wide, which is fine most of the time, normally we get a lot of sucess through the wings. But sometimes we don't. I've forgotten the game I was going to use (may have been Basel or Newcastle) but we just couldn't go through the centre even when getting crosses in wasn't working. Last season we'd have Scholes- one of his best attributes is that little give and go 20 yards from goal. His movement was superb, the way that people cum themselves of Xavi and Iniesta, Scholes had that ability. Granted we don't have a Scholes and we never will, so we need someone else to stamp their game on the pitch. Cleverley and Anderson have shown that similar characteristic already this season- that will to run beyond the ball, break from midfield. You don't have to be Iniesta to do that, even Jones did it well. The only problem is that I doubt Jones will be prolific in front of goal (brings me onto another point of the quality of finishing but that's for another topic). So do we buy and if so, who? Do we go for a closing down Hargreaves/De Jong type DM that restricts the opposition in midfield? And who would allow to play further up the pitch? Or do we go with Carrick and Cleverley/Anderson? Personally I think we need the former regardless, we need to bulk up our midfield. From what I've seen of Tunniclife in our youth team midfield, he looks like that bulldog in midfield, box to box type that we haven't had since Keane and the likes of Carrick and Fletcher have shown only in glimpses. But judging the way that SAF has handled youth over the last few years from our academy, he won't fast track them into the first team which is understandable. Question is who'd fit the bill.
Offer Roma £25m for DeRossi, at 28 he wont get in the way of Pogba and Tunnicliffes development too much and will be suspended plenty enough to give them game time in-between. A lot depends on where we see Jones` long term future, I like him in midfiled, he bosses and bullies his way around in there, though he needs to work on his first touch in tighter situations than he is used to dealing with at CB.I think its a positional instinct as he seems to push the ball a yard ahead of himself to burst on to it, something he cant get away with in CM too often.
