One of many current players that we’ll look back on one day and say “Is that all he cost?”
He’s the Bergkamp of full-backs, that’s how highly I rate him.
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I’ve said it and I’ll say it again, we would have won the title if he hadn’t been injured in his first season. He’s that good, that over the course of a season he could have made the difference for us. Shows again why squad depth now is absolutely critical.
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100%
Nice, fyi being dribbled past % after attempting 50+ true tackles before the end of March has been widely considered the number one measurement for evaluating defenders for as long as I can remember.
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True tackles?
THE GAMES GONE.
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VVD wishes he had those stats while attempting over 50 true tackles. He probably only attempted 37 or so the loser cunt.
He’s excellent.
But he turns into Alex Hleb in the box.
Thoughts on this (from Arseblog)?
We had moments in the final third we might have done better with, and not for the first time this season I saw Timber in positions where I’d love to see an attacking player rather than a right-back (with all due respect to him). It just feels counter-intuitive to have a defender in areas of the pitch you want a final third killer in.
A lot of times we have a defender in a promising position, where maybe an attacking player would be much more threatening.
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@Flexo has been bitching about this for a while.
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Thoughts are: Clubs like Real habe been doing this for decades, you +1 with a FB because opponents tend to double up on wingers regardless and with man-man marking no one’s got your FB so they immediately look dangerous when thry advabce, but then you need the technical quality and attacking sense in your FBs, which we haven’t had until recently..
Its partly just the quality of the players but it feels like the connections within the attack are just weak when we set up with a double pivot, Eze playing like a 10/second striker, and the fullbacks underlapping. Eze and Gyok are close together but we can’t get the ball to them anyway. The wingers can’t combine with the central players, the only “connective tissue” are underlapping fullbacks that aren’t very good in the box (Calafiori excepted).
The whole thing works better in my eyes when we have a single pivot, and two 8s that are really the connective players between the wingers and the striker. But Eze doesn’t seem comfortable doing that on the right hand side, he prefers the left and we tend to play him like a 10 close to Gyokeres.
Losing Merino, Odegaard, and Nwaneri at the same time really hurt our options in that right hand attacking midfield area. Hopefully Odegaard is back soon. In the right situation I’d like to see Dowman there sometime too.
Give him a couple of weeks off. He’s starting to break down. Hopefullly, he doesn’t get called up by the Netherlands.
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Included in the Dutch NT for the upcoming international break. Could/should mean he is available this Sunday as well.