The headlines make it sound like Ramirez is going to start or something. But Koeman pretty much said what you just did. The window is closed, so Ramirez is here. And he's working hard and showing a good attitude, so why not use him? He is #4 or something on the depth chart, but with injuries and Cup matches, there is some small amount of playing time for him and there's no reason not to give him those minutes if he's earned them. It was more "I'm not going to freeze Ramirez out," than "I've decided to give Ramirez a good, hard look at a starting spot." It was nothing more than a statement that Ramirez earned the right to play some garbage minutes in a lopsided Cup match. A rather back-handed compliment, but a compliment nonetheless.
or just outrageous skill in Le Tiss's case. I was happy to pay at the turnstile just to see him play.
Saw this post earlier but got distracted before I made a comment. No, I am not a great admirer of effort. Effort with skill, effort with determination, effort with purpose, effort with application, sure, I admire that greatly. But effort put in for the sake of making an effort is just a bit dense, which is why I always put skill above everything else. You can coach anyone, with pretences to being better than they are, eventually to make an effort. Coaching skill is far, far more difficult. Which is really why we loved Le Tiss. His skill was so high that he often made other skilful players look dense running around making tremendous efforts, while he could make the most exquisite skills seem easy. In fact, effortless.
I only castigate a player if he makes no effort. If he isn't good enough...well that's down to the manager who selected him. If someone gives as good as their ability allows we have little cause for complaint.
Personally, I consider effort to be something that the average good professional needs to 100% make as a baseline. Special players, like Le Tiss, Dimitar Berbatov, Messi, etc... can get away with not playing at 100% much of the time because they can change a game in a flash. Plus they also have the game intelligence to know where and how they are going to be most effective. Most of the time their football brains are running at twice the speed of other less capable players anyway. If anyone wants to admire effort alone they can go and watch low echelon non-league football. Plenty of effort there. To give an instance where effort alone is useless - back in 2008, when Saints were being managed by Jan Poortvliet, the players were mostly U21s, who largely were busting a gut every game, trying to get results. However, because their efforts were unfocused, badly managed, and they were naive in any case, the Saints crowd accused them as not trying. This eventually transmitted itself to the players over so many games and they became scared to make mistakes, which froze them. One could clearly see that they were trying their hardest, ie, making every effort, but it counted for very little, and it certainly wasn't appreciated by the Saints crowd. Good subject Cardiff Saint
Yeah, but Keegan wasn't lacking when it came to skill either. He may not have been at genius level but he had enough to be incredibly effective.
I don't think anything annoys me more than a player not putting the effort in though. If they have a bad day (poor first touches, long passes etc) then I can forgive that much more easily.
That's the key phrase. It doesn't annoy me. For the average professional player, not putting in the effort is unacceptable and just won't happen, unless there are circumstances we don't know about. For example, James Beattie used to chase absolutely everything down, and then he stopped chasing absolutely everything, and the crowd went boo, he's not trying. But he was playing half of his last season with a knee injury, so was in pain all the time and wasn't as fit as he could be either. What I'm saying is, 99% of players are busting a gut and the rest are the geniuses who don't need to.
