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Football's greatest - where does Lionel Messi rank?


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Guest firetotheworks

I was just watching a compilation there. Honestly man it's like he has Bernard's Watch when he's dribbling. You genuinely couldn't get it off him in a phone box like, he makes everyone else look like Amdy Faye.

 

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Well, it really depends on who is doing the scapegoating in fairness.

 

On the forum, his stock seems to rise as high as "model pro, decent fourth choice CB for a club with our resources" (which seems a fair assessment to me) and drop as low as "get rid, not good enough, I would rather play Street/Good/no one at all" depending on our form.

 

We've been over this so very many times. He's fine, not great. Very limited ball-player. Perfectly capable of functioning in a decent, winning attacking side - the trick is for him not to be doing the attacking. Again, similarly to why he is getting the volume of games he is, the responsibility for that lies with the Ashley/Pardew regime.

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Well, it really depends on who is doing the scapegoating in fairness.

 

On the forum, his stock seems to rise as high as "model pro, decent fourth choice CB for a club with our resources" (which seems a fair assessment to me) and drop as low as "get rid, not good enough, I would rather play Street/Good/no one at all" depending on our form.

 

We've been over this so very many times. He's fine, not great. Very limited ball-player. Perfectly capable of functioning in a decent, winning attacking side - the trick is for him not to be doing the attacking. Again, similarly to why he is getting the volume of games he is, the responsibility for that lies with the Ashley/Pardew regime.

 

His lack of ability permeates the whole side, though. The midfield stay deep to protect him, we can't play a high line because of his lack of pace and we can't trust him to play it out from the back either.

 

And that's all before we've even gotten to the individual mistakes he seems to be making every game.

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I don't majorly disagree with any of that tbh - although, I didn't hear a peep about this when he played at West Brom (a) last season etc (hence the scapegoating, now we're doing poorly*) - and that's why he ought to be fourth choice.

 

As for the individual mistakes: if you give the ball away as frequently and cheaply as we do, you invite teams to attack you, which combines poorly (from our point of view) with having a fourth choice centre back as a regular first-teamer - so inevitably the opposition are going to shake some change out of Williamson at least once or twice a game given how much we let them attack him. Not taking care of the ball like we do is tantamount to asking them to rigourously inspect our defensive deficiencies.

 

It's not lost on me that Williamson is one of the main perpetrators of losing possession for us with his punts, but again, I think this is predominantly a tactics/ethos issue for which Pardew is responsible.

 

* - well, largely the same, minus the results/rub of the green

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Oh, and I've never been a fan of us playing a high line - our defence is super ill-suited to it. Fulham slaughtered us at the Cottage by just hitting balls into the channels. I think the defence should play deep - and with Colo, Williamson is up to task provided we're not consistently inviting the opposition to "stress test" him until he makes a rick. We'd have better in an ideal world, (or in a world post-January, hopefully), but his poor form is a symptom of an underlying ill not the cause.

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