Jonestown83

His positioning is terrible and he flaps at everything because he refuses to move from his line a header from nearly the edge of the box can beat him where most other keepers would just pick it up or at worst push it round the post , the slightest deflection leaves him nowhere and qpr are able to cross the ball from distance into our six yard box to cause chaos where any capable keeper would just take a step forward and take the ball. he’s not at fault for the fourth however watch any other capable keeper in the same situation their sprinting of the the line to close the angle when the ball hits the net he’s not a yard off his line he basically looks like the kid who says I’ll give it a go when your normal goalkeeper doesn’t turn up on a Sunday morning the lads in his mid 20s now not an up and comer he’s as good as he’s ever going to get and it’s the same mistakes every game whether it costs us or not he’s just nowhere near good enough

We were overrun in midfield because their “free” defender in the back 3 stepped into the midfield and carried the ball drawing a midfielder leaving it 2 on 3 in the middle out free defender is Tom lees who didn’t and never does this

A lot of lower league teams scrapped their academies around 5 years ago due to the rule change that was introduced this basically allowed premier league teams to come in and sign their good youngsters for peanuts I believe the figure was something like 150k max for any academy players brentford made the decision at the time that it made financial sense to just sign players a little older and work from there which they’ve done very successfully many others have failed miserably. theres currently around 35 academies operating which means over half the teams in the football league are operating the “Brentford” model I can’t remember any other success stories in regards this approach we seem to have moved more to the bit of both worlds approach bringing in released players from premier league teams. which I feel is the right way to go however with youth players I think it’s 90% luck if any of them go onto make it. if you look back over the England u17 teams over the last 20 years 75% of them you’ve never even heard of but at that time where considered the most promising In the country there’s no surefire route to success with youth but we seem to be moving in the right direction

No Waldock looked decent for half an hour then faded badly the two at the back where overly tentative and constantly out of position leaving massive holes throughout the game and the sole blame for this seems to be being put on borner because he’s older not saying there might not be something there but right here right now their not taking anybody’s place in the first team and need to be loaned out however due to the lack of squad depth they can’t be deli on the other hand looks to be a great signing strong athletic and bursts forward with the ball at his feet not really something we’ve had since Carlton Palmer he’s the type of player that two good seasons at this level he’s a £15m player

If you watch his positioning when screening the defence he stops the ball coming into dangerous areas simply by occupying the correct space I’ve never seen a stat that says times forced opposition attack backwards by being in the right space

Luongo is a very good player criminally underrated by some he does a lot of work that isn’t picked up by the stats or score worldies so doesn’t stand out he’s often the player sat blocking a pass and taking up a position that causes the opposition to have to pass the ball back twenty yards we as a fan base seem to prefer someone who runs round diving into challenges when in reality the only reason you need to leave your feet is if your in the wrong position To begin with and are trying to make up for it Paulo Maldini “if i have to make a tackle I’ve already made a mistake”

I’m not arguing the fact he’s a decent championship left midfielder. my point is he’s terrible in any other position and the current suggestions around reach seem to be to just find him a spot whether he can play it or not. what the stats don’t show is the number of poor passes and weak tackles he’s put in whilst playing cm that allowed an opposition to break creating chances or that at left wing back he’s not defensively aware enough or quick enough to make up when he makes a mistake. if we go into the new season playing the wingback system he becomes obselete in that system he can’t play any of the positions required and we have much better options based on purely using your stats we should play him centre half because he’ll create assists doesn’t matter that he can’t play there and makes basic mistakes that a player who actually plays there doesn’t

it’s quite easy to make certain players look good if you use their career stats they make Giles de bilde look like a world beater. most of his out of position games came early on in his career Whilst on loan in lower divisions hes utterly woeful here unless played on the left in a four man midfield. he falls into the same category as forestieri because of the one really good season we seem to forget he’s been terrible for the other 3 seasons and everyone wants to live in hope that he can get that form back for some reason we seem to want to shoe horn players into positions They can’t play rather then get rid and get someone who can actually play that position and build a team. weve tried him left wing back and left back awful central midfield even worse left midfield decent it looks like we aren’t going to play with a left midfielder so the obvious answer is get rid.

Why is it everyone wants young players that hopefully have massive resale value but when it sounds like we’re after someone like that they’re not good enough. da Cruz wasn’t amazing last year no worse then anyone else tbf ,however he’s at the age all it takes is one good season and with the attributes he has he’s worth 15m+ the other suggestion seems to be get someone from the lower divisions who’s scored a few. the fact these players are now 3m plus rules us out by the looks of it the days of robbing lower league teams hot prospects for 20p and a bag of quavers are long gone. Ivan Toney who’s failed miserably outside of l1 on the back of one good season is worth 10m Ollie Watkins who’s goal scoring record wasn’t anything special went for 2m purely on potential and that was 2/3 seasons ago we’re going to end up with a few strikers that nobodies ever heard of from the Italian or Spanish 2nd divisions as the evidence seems to suggest that’s the market we’re shopping in with the hope they come good. However a youngster who can’t get a game for a poor team in Scotland doesn’t fill me with confidence

an accusation based purely on where he’s from Your not from round here you must be sneaky with 0 evidence to support this otherwise there’re be no need to mention the country of his birth

And it appears their response to this is we didn’t look at it properly because were off on our jollies or have I misunderstood that ? if you used that defence in any court in the land you’d be laughed out

my sentences are like our goalkeepers sloppy , unpredictable and all over the place

Westwood appears to have become the new heffernan bringing him back won’t solve all if any of the problems we seem to think if he comes back he’ll automatically be the player he was 3 seasons ago however if he’s not going to play we desperately need to bring in an experienced first choice keeper goalkeepers are very different to outfield players only the truly exceptional ones ever hit there stride before their late 20s both Dawson and wildsmith have enough good qualities to justify keeping them around to try and work on the gaps In their games but at this level those gaps cost goals that Westwood just wouldn’t have conceded Bringing someone like Darlow or vorm would be excellent business Weirdly people are dismissing vorm because of his age but he’s a year older then Westwood and with goalkeepers they normally play 5-8 years longer then outfield players at a high level it’s easy to speculate as to why Westwood hasn’t been picked but it’s clear he’s not fancied so time to bring someone else in and wish him al the best

Fletcher will always be massively underrated by many on here mainly because he wasn’t all fancy flicks and tricks I’ve actually seen some criticism on here blaming him for our goalkeepers choosing to aim goal kicks at him with him being one of the best headers of the ball in the league strange tactic that rather then letting Tom lees try and play out from the back he’s been one of the few that hasn’t gone missing over the last few seasons there’s been a lot of talk about the mentality of the squad been weak but people will slate the guy who’d quite happily get his face kicked off if there was half a chance it’d end up in a goal he picked up a lot of niggling injuries mainly due to this and spent a lot of the time on the floor because he’d gone for a ball he had zero right to win got there and often ended up winning a free kick after being cleaned out by the defender who didn’t expect him to be there fletcher should be the blueprint for any younger player we’re looking to try and sign to try get us out of the mess we’re currently in he played like he was a winner and never shirked anything think back to his debut can you imagine forestieri kicking off about needing to be substituted because he had blood weeing out of his face then played a week or so later with a gaping hole in his head if that was semedo or hutchinson the fans would be wanting a statue erecting

Played 25 won 4 drawn 8 lost 13 you’d think it was monks record but it’s paul cooks up to the turn of the year a record like that here wouldnt allow him to become the current flavour of the week He’d have been long hounded out his stock has risen because they’ve managed to pull a few results out under difficult circumstances at a time when half the league aren’t playing for much and a good number of players are more concerned about not getting injured but let’s go all out to get the current hard done to media darling because that worked so well last time when we brought in some guy who’s teams played like Brazil or so the media liked to say