Time to drop Pelle?????????

[SouthamptonFCroatia]

He's a frustrating player. He wins the aerial duels more often than not, gets the ball, and then he tries some crazy first touch pass in behind the defense. Those kind of passes are incredibly difficult to hit and of course 99% of the time they don't find the target. Thus all the good work Pelle did by winning the ball is instantly nullified. All he needs to understand is that his job is to simply to lay the ball to the closest teammate, and then that teammate is in a position to play the pass that Pelle tries to do all the time. If he did that, he would immediately be twice the player he is.

 

[Schad]

He's a frustrating player. He wins the aerial duels more often than not, gets the ball, and then he tries some crazy first touch pass in behind the defense. Those kind of passes are incredibly difficult to hit and of course 99% of the time they don't find the target. Thus all the good work Pelle did by winning the ball is instantly nullified. All he needs to understand is that his job is to simply to lay the ball to the closest teammate, and then that teammate is in a position to play the pass that Pelle tries to do all the time. If he did that, he would immediately be twice the player he is.

Or even better: lay it off and immediately break off the defender's shoulder for a return ball; force a defender who was moving forward to contest the duel to backpedal, unsettle the defensive line. And if the ball doesn't come, because the midfielder didn't react in time/passing angle wasn't right/Pelle was offside when it came time to pass, get back into the play straight away rather than cursing the heavens (or said teammate).

I don't want him to be something he is not. I just want him to be the player he was for the first few months of his tenure.

 

[I Sorry I Ruined The Party]

He slacked on Saturday. Several times I watched as he just walked about at a time when he should have either been offering himself or tracking a defender. This was commented on by the three people I took who didn't know who he was ( they were not Saints fans) and referred to him as the no.19.

Pelle tends to pout a little too long when he loses the ball. It's annoying, but Mane does this as well. I think it was last game Mane made a good run and then a bad cross, and after making that bad cross he immediately turned away and started moping. Turns out the ball ended up coming right back to him and if he'd stayed alert he might have scored.

The other thing Pelle does is he sometimes gets sulky at the end of a game. And when that happens, I would start subbing him until he learns. Especially when you can hammer the lesson him by bringing in Long who seems to never give up and will run all day. But 10 minutes less of Pelle at the end of a game in which he's been starved of service and has become too frustrated is not going to fix the our attacking woes.

I wouldn't argue that Pelle tries flicks/backheels/fancy one-timers too often. But to me, it's really a minor flaw. We dominated possession against West Brom without scoring, so it's not like a couple more safe passes back to some midfielder would have accomplished all that much. Did we give away possession cheaply? Sort of. But not in anyway that Pelle could solve.

We made a lot of sloppy passes against West Brom. In the end Pelle likely had the highest ratio. But in the end, someone has to attack... why not him? All we did last game was pass and pass and pass until finally someone made a bad one, or we put in an ineffective cross. If we had an attacking mid capable of making that incisive through ball, I'd say yeah, Pelle should just hold up the ball and pass it to that guy all the time. But we don't.

I actually get more annoyed when sometimes Pelle wins the aerial battle or chests it nicely, holds off a defender and then lays it off for JWP to blaze 5 yards over the bar, or it ends up eventually getting passed all the way back to the defense.

 

[Saints_Alive]

Pelle tends to pout a little too long when he loses the ball. It's annoying, but Mane does this as well. I think it was last game Mane made a good run and then a bad cross, and after making that bad cross he immediately turned away and started moping. Turns out the ball ended up coming right back to him and if he'd stayed alert he might have scored.

The other thing Pelle does is he sometimes gets sulky at the end of a game. And when that happens, I would start subbing him until he learns. Especially when you can hammer the lesson him by bringing in Long who seems to never give up and will run all day. But 10 minutes less of Pelle at the end of a game in which he's been starved of service and has become too frustrated is not going to fix the our attacking woes.

I wouldn't argue that Pelle tries flicks/backheels/fancy one-timers too often. But to me, it's really a minor flaw. We dominated possession against West Brom without scoring, so it's not like a couple more safe passes back to some midfielder would have accomplished all that much. Did we give away possession cheaply? Sort of. But not in anyway that Pelle could solve.

We made a lot of sloppy passes against West Brom. In the end Pelle likely had the highest ratio. But in the end, someone has to attack... why not him? All we did last game was pass and pass and pass until finally someone made a bad one, or we put in an ineffective cross. If we had an attacking mid capable of making that incisive through ball, I'd say yeah, Pelle should just hold up the ball and pass it to that guy all the time. But we don't.

I actually get more annoyed when sometimes Pelle wins the aerial battle or chests it nicely, holds off a defender and then lays it off for JWP to blaze 5 yards over the bar, or it ends up eventually getting passed all the way back to the defense.

I agree with most of what you say, if Pelle gets the right service, then he has proved he will score. The main problem is that we have had too many CMs in the team that are not providing the incisive passing and trickery to open up defences.
JWP and Steven Davis are great if you want to control a game when you are leading, they can pass and keep possession well but rarely find a killer ball. Having JWP, Davis and Vic in the side is a bit of overkill on "safe" passing in the midfield, you need at least one of them to make a break into the box or play a through ball.