Our most technically gifted midfielder, able to turn on a six pence, beat a man with ease and pick passes between the lines, never gets a game. Discuss.
He was dreadful against Spurs in the 5-2 defeat and seemed to lack effort and hasn't been seen since. Perhaps he has lost faith in Pellegrino and that is why he is overlooked?
Doesn't matter how many threads like this we have the answer is always the same. The manager is useless and is getting away with it, the situation should have been dealt with months ago so the blame for the whole situation lays with Les and the Board.
I worry that the whole process is including alienating and unsettling our best players. Gabbi and Mario in particular (along with Sofiane).
Pellegrino strikes me as being a timid Manager and easily swayed by the senior players (the ones that have been at the club the longest), Davis, Long, Tadic etc...
Sofiane looked uninterested yesterday when he came on. Wrong if he was sulking, but that is how it looked to me.
Its a vicious circle with inconsistent flair players. They need to be given extended runs in the team, however if they go off the boil they are dropped. I can see why he is frustrated but we can't afford to be playing inconsistent 'luxury' players in attack atm.
I thought the same thing. Even so, and despite over playing and losing the ball time after time yesterday, he still looked our most dangerous player and the Brighton players were clearly scared of facing him.
Funny how people see things. I think what we need to do is just that, play an Inconsistent flair player. We need something special to create something. Playing it safe will not get us out of this hole. It is what put us in it.
That's a good point, but if he chooses Boufal and he goes missing in games the he takes the flack. If he plays, say, Davis, you kind of know what to expect. I agree that Boufal needs a run of playing every week with the same attacking players but I can see why he gets dropped and the manager is desperate.
I’m not meaning in performance, but if you watch the second half back, you may see what I saw: he was on my side mostly in front of me that half. For the first 10-15 minutes, he didn’t chase back like he normally does (and did later on) and played a few really awful passes and looked completely unbothered by it. Normally he looks annoyed with himself and apologises to team mates. I’m not saying his performance was bad, just he started like he was pissed off, but not the whole half. It looked to me like he was pissed at being on the bench and as I said “when he came on”
