No injury, think was just to rest him/give Kelly some game time. I thought he was decent going forward today. Yes he's no Dani Alves but then not many full backs are. He put in a very good cross which Skrtel should have scored from, was composed and when got forward kept things simple and played the ball to players who were more dangerous. I can't fault him today and his little turn down the line in the 2nd half to get past 2 of their players was very good.
So you say Flanagan is ok defensively but doesn't offer anything in attack and this is bad. Yet you say Johnson is poor defensively and only good going forward and this is also bad. Yes we all want a Cafu/Lahm that are awesome at both but only the WC full backs are that! You can't slate them both for opposite reasons. Maybe it's a nice balance that 1 can attack and 1 can defend.
Can't argue with that. He did pick up last year when he was being challenged by Kelly, Wisdom and Flanno so maybe its the lack of competition? With Kelly back and Flanno doing well, we may see an improvement soon enough. However, I've been saying for a while that he'll go #newera
Not saying he's been disastrous but I thought Noone had the best of him. Pretty much all of Cardiffs attacks came down the right hand side. Not slagging him off but just saying that we need upgrades.
That;s the thing - Flannagan was just OK. He is still beaten far too easily on occasions but I cut him a bit of slack since he;s a youngster playing in an unfamiliar role. EDIT: If I was being harsh, Flanno is simply not good enough at this level.
Yeah. Well at his best he is very good - he just needs to start earning his pennies. As you say competition may help and he has the rest of the season to prove his worth.
In my opinion he's been better than ok, not only in this game but since the Everton game. He was beaten once of twice against Everton early but then played very well and was solid. I don't think he was beaten too easily today at all. The winger may have got past him once but that's always going to happen even to the best full backs. He had little support from Coutinho as well who drifted inside leaving him 1v1. I've said before I don't think long term he's good enough but at the moment he's proving me wrong and I'm happy about it.
But at the moment he's done nothing wrong to suggest anyone else would come in and do a better job - that's my whole point
So you don't think Flanno is good enough for long term but you don't think there's anyone else out there who could be better?
That's not what I said. At the moment on current form there is no guarantee that any potential new signing will come in and do any better in a defensive/attacking way unless we signed someone like Lahm/Alaba/Baines but none of those are realistic.
Fair enough - there is never any guarantee that potential signings will succeed. But that doesn't mean that we should just accept certain players to continue playing because we're scared that we can't replace them. It's the same with Johnson - we're putting players up on pedestals because we think we cannot replace them with better players. There always risks attached but looking at even more extreme examples - we didn't think we could replace Torres (Suarez), Reina (Mignolet), Agger (Sakho).
Just for the record - not slagging Flanno off. Putting it into context, young lad playing in an unfamiliar position and he's done ok. In the context of a team wanting to win titles and trophies, it's not good enough. But I don't want to digress - Sakho is a beast!
