i thought he's been pretty decent for us lately, despite the 3 losses. absolute thankless task playing that defensive midfield role for city, he organises well, knits the team togetehr by keeping it simple, works his arse off, often does other peoples tracking players, yet some want cairney in the team whos inconsistent plays it safe all the time and sounds like hes got a bit of an ego. its a pretty common disease people only seeing and appreciating tricks and flicks, and the flare side of the game, the hard work, organising and the donkey work that is often doing other peoples defensive tracking back and marking is alot more important in my eyes. ashbee mark two
McKenna appears to have been transformed into the "Quiet Achiever" doing the necessary competently and his value is often overlooked.
Agreed. It's very rare that the defensive midfielder for City gets anything but stick, but McKenna has been doing particularly well for us. He tends to be available for simple passes when the ball down the line to Stewart isn't an option, he plays it simple, and probably boosts our possession stats a fair bit in games.
In my opinion every team needs a midfield "engine" to keep things running and do all the basic but essential work. That's why Ashbee was always my favourite player before he left. (I still see his injury vs Villa as the turning point of our first PL campaign) McKenna is doing a brilliant job at filling this role, and it's nice to see others noticing his quiet but pivotal contribution
i agree, thought he was excellent today, just behind evans and koren in the motm running...loved the moment when somebody tried to turn him and he just stood his ground they bounced off him to the floor and he just came away with the ball... what i noticed about him today as well, is he is never far away from the ref, always in his ear, if he was playing against us i would hate him for that, but we need somebody like that as we are often too soft and naive
Him and Evans were furthest away from MOTM for me today. That first half was ****ing terrible, two sitting midfielders and yet P'boro were constantly able to run through the middle at our defence. Best moment was when their left back played a ball across the pitch, McKenna's man just rolled him and went the long way round with the ball. McKenna decided to just stop while play was going on, turned to Stewart (who was on our left at the time) and started doing a Harper impression (pointing whilst bollocking him for not running back quickly enough).
