Keepers for a club of our stature should be a cheap signing, nobody in the bottom half of the Prem is paying upwards of £5m or so for their first choice. If Chelsea want to offer £10m or so for Ruddy, I'd have to say take it, and hope that's enough income that we can mitigate damage to our outfield squad, assuming we're still a championship side. If we go up then it's a different question. Nothing against Ruddy, he's always come across as modest, dedicated Pro, but pragmatically he's been average this season and possibly one of the easiest assets to cash in on.
This may be true, but he's cost us no more than our inadequate CB's. I would say for example, that the insistance in playing Martin at CB has cost us much more than Ruddy.
Whilst Rusty clearly could have done a lot better with the goal on Saturday, Ruddy did make a hash of the initial shot and he also should have definitely done better. Haven't seen much criticism of Ruddy for that though, and Rusty appears to be taking all the flak, which is pretty much par for the course for many Canary fans over the past few seasons. Certain players are allowed to make mistakes and get away with it whereas some others only have to put a foot out of place and they get slated for every error. Inversely some players get loads of praise when they put in a good performance whereas others don't get a mention when they are great as some fans are just waiting for a mistake to be made so they can get on their back. Whittaker is a classic one that fits into that bracket, and to a slightly lesser extent Russell Martin, particularly since he's been played at CB (by no less than four different managers I should also add).
I think the Whits criticism has fallen off a cliff tbh Munky, no doubt because his performances since the shocker v Brentford have been irreproachable Will be interesting to see if he does make a mistake what happens though
That's kinda what I'm getting at, his performances over the past few months have been excellent and therefore you don't hear people talking about him much, however just wait until he makes an error on the pitch and then we'll hear about how rubbish he is and how Scottish players are toilet.
I have no axe to grind with any NCFC players but I was certainly critical of Whit's earlier in the season because he was not, in my opinion, playing well at all. I agree that he has improved markedly and so naturally people are not criticising him. I am sure that the criticism of Rusty is linked to the fact that a number of people (myself included) thought that he was a better RB than Whits (which in fairness now may not be the case on form) and not as good a CB as other squad members so by his insistence on playing CB we were doubly weakening our defence. I have seen and heard a fair bit of criticism of Ruddy for the goal on Saturday but that has I feel been tempered by the fact that he made an excellent double save early on and looked pretty solid for the rest of the match whereas Rusty had a very poor game pretty much from start to finish - he was out jumped, out paced and out muscled on a number of occasions. I only watched the game on tv so I may have missed any excellent movement or organisation he was doing off-screen but he looked poor and the goal was certainly a direct result of his initial poor clearance followed by his not being able to block the initial shot. He does either task effectively and Ruddy doesn't have the chance to make the error. One thing I will say is that Rusty has shown himself to have a strong character and I am sure that he will bounce back on Saturday. He is definitely the sort of bloke along with Ruddy, BJ and Howson who you would want in the dressing room at this time.
You ask any team and I'm certain the majority will say their keeper has saved them points. I've said many times before Whittaker was rubbish, and he absolutely was before AN took over. I rarely get to see City nowadays, but when I have and in conjunction with hearing his name constantly on the radio commentary he has been fantastic.
You mean the same Whittaker who was out of position multiple times against Ipswich and could have been aligned with Martin and counteracted the poor header. he has been less poor in my opinion, rather than good. I've quite liked him for his forward play and have never been bothered to slag him off. I imagine if he could improve his positional sense , he'd be a half decent defender that offers something going forward
I wasn't directly referring to your posts, more the previous posts which were showering him with praise
