We now know why Vargas wasn't playing. Rambo said he wasn't putting in the work in training and wasn't fit. "We had a few - discussions - shall we say!" Sounds like he had it out with him more than once too. Maybe Zarate going back to West Ham has helped the situation.
Agree. I thought Nico did well Saturday, good vision in his passes and many sensible ones, and overall I thought he was an improvement on Vargas, who apart from his goal made a lot of mistakes in the short time he was on, giving the ball away in dangerous positions. Nico looked fitter than he has been tooo, hope he's good for 90 at Villa..
Kranjcar offers ten times as much as Hoilett or Traore. What the **** has happened to Traore- he was looking really good on the wing at times last season
Was just looking at the table there. We've scored more than all of the other bottom 8 sides. We've conceded 55 while no other team has reached the 50's yet. Our defense is very weak. The two fullbacks aren't good enough (they're not really fullbacks) and Caulker is just too dosy. He certainly wasn't worth 8 Mil.
Yun is out with concussion, so I presume that Hill will be playing. Might explain his positioning after the Brom player pushed him onto Green's fist. Perhaps three at the back might be worth re-visiting?
That's what happens when your highly experienced manager decides he'll go with three at the back, sells the only natural right-back to a rival then after two games decides to go 4-4-2. Caulker can only ever look even close to good next to a defender who talks him through the whole game. His lack of sense on the field for a bloke who has presumably been playing the game since childhood is quite amazing
It was Caulker who was closest to Anichebe when he scored on Saturday. Close but not close enough. I've defended Caulker on here in the past but it's dozy moments like that which give ammunition to his critics.
I still think the future is a 4-2-3-1 formation for us but if the experts say that OBZ playing in a 4-4-2 is likely to unsettle Villa, they may have a point for this particular game. However, the repetitive, predictable and unsuccessful monotony of the hoof ball we played against Everton, prompted by OBZ's selection, must NOT be repeated. I certainly wouldn't play 3 at the back. We have no recent experience of playing that formation and this is no time for radical experiments like that. Despite our results, we have had some promising spells in recent games, playing a more settled team rather than Harry's "names out of a hat" selection process.
I thought Isla was equally at fault for that one - he did well to tackle Berenino (sp?) initially, but then stood a good 2 meters off him, with his arms behind his back, when he got the ball back letting him pick out Anichebe without hindrance. Agree Caulker should have competed far better there though.
The Irish Independent newspaper over here included two of our players in their Premiership team of the weekend. Bobby Zamora and Steven Caulker.
Correct - appears in this photo that he was attempting to push him out of the way, rather than win the ball. please log in to view this image
Slightly off topic, but I'm 100% certain that when I looked for our live games on Sky, this was one of them? Now it looks like it's been replaced by Bristol City vs Swindon.
It did say tomorrow's date, I remember thinking at the time that it was odd to get a 19.45 on a Tuesday on sky. Ropey stream on the interweb it is then!
Sadly that's all too common nowadays. I'd rather the defender focuses on the ball rather than the player. We'd get more balls cleared from defence.
Hoof ball worked on Saturday. Punt upfield and a flick-on, then a lay back for Vargas. Long ball out wide, and then (I can hardly believe I'm typing this) Zamora outpaced the covering defender and flicked it in over the keeper from wide of the area at full pace..... Long balls don't always harm us...
