Just to highlight the way our perceptions cloud our judgement and perceptions of players. So Lamela apparently deserves to start because it is unfair to promote the newbies above him in the pecking order before they even started to train. However for Parker to have been dismissed even before he signed the dotted line was apparently fine because he was a dinosaur whose style was now extinct... only to have that same style then compared to Mascherano, who would probably walk into an team in the world... style or no style.
At the end of the day, all it shows is that we all have our favourite players who we form an attachment to, sometimes (if not, most of the time) relatively irrationally based more on hope and expectations than rational argument. We then use every trick in the book (including often selective use of stats) to convince ourselves that we are right. I don't think this should be surprising because after all, that is exactly how we choose the team we decide to support.
So at the end of the day, some posters will continue to live in hope and see the (?occasional) assists, rabonas or key pass as justification for their support of the player and others will look at the plodding, ineffective dribbles and lack of goals in the rest of his play as equally persuasive arguments for dissing the lad.
And - as we saw for Soldado - this will not resolve itself until something dramatic happens... either he does a wordlie and wins us a game against a top 4 club single handedly or else does a Soldado vs Fiorentina and makes a blunder so monstrous that defending him will be impossible, even for his most ardent backers.
