some good football without Bent? passing it square and backwards in the middle of the pitch a bit more than we had in the few games before doesnt make good football. we still hardly created anything or looked like scoring. games we have played without Bent
QPR 1-1 poor performance could only score with a soft penalty
Liverpool 0-2 rubbish, never looked like scoring
Arsenal 1-2 only scored with a gift from arsenal, only other effort on goal was gabbys header early on.
stoke 0-0 dull, boring game, made their keeper work just once
chelsea, the only game you could call good. 1-1 when he came on, finished 3-1 to us.
just like the gabby "has no football brain, is an athlete not a footballer" myth that we had a few seasons back, it seems we now have the Bent just stands there waiting for the ball myth. im not going to claim his hold up play is great, but it is adequate, and he clearly worked on it under houllier. get the ball to his feet and get some support quick and it is fine. smash the ball at his head while he has 2 cbs marking him and no support and hes never going to hold it up. he is not physically big and strong enough.
i have no idea what style of football we play, and it looks like the players have no idea either. we could do we getting bent the ball in the final third with some regularity, let alone the 6 yard box. the same goes for gabby. we spent most of monday punting aimless balls up to them, or having them watch as deep booming crosses sail over their heads.
mind you, its not a surprise Mcleish is killing our strikers. last season blues scored just 37 league goals. their top scorer was craig gardner with 8. defenders accounted for another 8. phillips, jerome, zigic, o'connor, derbyshire, martins and mcfadden scored just 9 league goals combined. i know most of them are shit, but you should still be able to get more than 9 goals out of all of them. pretty clear mcleishs tactics were to play negative anti football and hope gardner could score a screamer or they could nick 1 from a set piece.
he has no idea how to utilise decent attacking players. blues couldnt score enough due to him and went down because of it. we are having the same troubles in scoring. hopefully its not the same result
This is a brilliant post and contains everything anyone with any doubts can't seem to understand.
Also, why on earth are people starting to argue about who they would keep out of Gabby and Bent?? So unnecessary! Everyone needs to calm down.
Unfortunately the board and current manager have created such paranoia around this club that people are starting to question which limbs we need to cut off when we don't even need to.
Christ.