With the way newcasle play would this be a good game for howson to get some more time under his belt to get back from his injury and with city having a lot of defenders in form will bennett even get much of a run in this team? personally i think it would be better to try to keep the same defence game after game giving the team more stable. And with the game being on sky how many tickets have been sold?
Generally this is the case even in the past two season where we had really strong records we still managed to lose when gracing Sky's cameras still we should be able to alter this against Wigan. If we can't break the hoodoo with a home game against the bottom club then we may have to resign ourselves to defeats when the cameras are rolling! I am a little more optimistic about the Newcastle game as I don't think that they are playing particularly well at present and we have players coming in to complete for places and strengthen the squad although it would be a great help if they played four full backs again and if Ba picked up a knock beforehand!
Hopefully, the match against Wigan will be a bit more of a footballing spectacle than our last fixture, and Howson will have a better chance of showing what he is capable of. If he plays well no reason why he shouldn't keep his place in the side that plays Newcastle. That is the beauty of competition, keeps players on their toes. As regards to a settled defence, I completely agree. It's been hard this season because of injuries obviously, but would be looking to see a more settled defence next season. What defensive line up would yo like to see?
My favourite back 4 in recent times would be :- Naughton, Ayala, Whitbread Tierney! If we could keep them injury free, I would be very happy!
Think we will have to push the boat out to get Naughton, but if we had that line up on a regular basis might get a few more clean sheets.
I think many people reckon that is probably our best back 4, but how often this season have we actually managed to get them all playing together?
Correct me if wrong, but I don't think we have ever had that back four- by the time Ayala was back in the squad I think Tierney was injured. As I said before, I think missing Tierney has been one of the reasons we've not scored so many recently- as I said before in games with Tierney we've scored 1.6 goals on average, but without him we've scored less than 1 goal on average. Drury is great in defence- as Lambert said one-on-one he's amongst the best, but Tierney offers that threat going forward and I really hope this injury doesn't continue too much longer
Spot on. I think he has shown himself to be as good a left back as anybody in the Prem. All the ones raved about by the pundits, Cole, Enrique, etc haven't convinced me. Evra is the real standout for me.
