Re: Transfer Rumours
Disagree. The amount of horrendous individual lapses and errors suggests poor individual defenders. No amount of drilling and coaching can legislate for the brain farts and sloppy play and horrendous passing witnessed this season from our defence.
Vertonghen losing the flight of the ball letting the defender steel a march on him and trying to rugby tackle the striker in a desperate attempt to make up for his brain fart pulling the guys shorts down in the process?
Naughton's howlers against Southampton?
Vertonghen's howlers v Liverpool, City,Arsenal etc
Chiriches pass across the defence blind recently
Kaboul v Liverpool...the list is almost endless
You can set up tactics, drills and coaching all you like you cant legislate for the weak, mentally fragile, prone to lapses crappy defending we regularly see from these guys under TWO managers one of whom implemented an ultra defensive system.
Naughton, Vertonghen, post-injury Kaboul and Rose are rank bad defenders that regularly display clown like lapses that directly lead to chances and goals
I think Daws and Chiriches can look solid in the right system and a settled team
I was watching a PL game with Souness as a pundit probably 10 years ago or thereabouts. A Saudi Sportswashing Machine player (I think) played a horrible backpass, the opponent ran onto it and scored. Asked in the studio Souness said one of the dumbest things I've ever heard from a pundit: "You can't work on that on the training ground". Seriously? You cannot get it into a player's head that he has to look up before passing the ball back to the goalkeeper? Suddenly the reason why Souness failed as a manager looked pretty clear...
Now I'm not saying that your post is the same, but there seems to be this view that some things can't be improved by the manager or on the training ground. I disagree. Certainly top class defenders will always be more consistant than poor defenders and won't make as many silly mistakes. But still it's possible to improve and it's possible for managers/coaches to do something about stuff like this.
Look at Liverpool, look at Martin Skrtel. I'm sure many people have said that he just isn't good enough and that there's nothing a manager can do about it. Similarly for them Carragher went from a squad/utility player to a clear first choice for them under Benitez.
Look at us, we had a real problem of conceding late goals early on under AVB. He, by his own words, changed our training a bit, added more high intensity activities towards the end of sessions and we improved. Did it actually improve the players permanently? Or was it just a belief/placebo things? Or was it perhaps a combination? Who knows? But it seemed to work.
Top managers/coaches have a history of making average looking players look much better in their system, with confidence, with belief. To make players that might at other clubs be good enough look very good, exactly by drilling and coaching. I don't know about you, but many times I thought about some United player and thought "well, he's not good enough for United" only to 5 years later still see the same player there, much improved, much more consistent.
