Poor man's Holtby
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Bring him in, take all his ideas, ship him out and tell everyone he's crazy..
Sounds like Chelsea
Really with hindsight Daws is probably worth more than £10m, although that is definitely based on this excellent season.
Patient build up, pressing, hard work rate, high defensive line(ish). Needs another "ball" player in midfield who can dominate games and a shit-hot striker for it to work well.
Pre this season with what evidence of his playstyle ten mill was magnificent, but the guy has proved that you can teach an old dog new tricks! He's been fantastic at springing the offside trap so many times this season and the fact he now more often than not look for the easy short pass rather then the hollywood hope crossfield (tho when he does this these days they are often done superbly) has proved that he's not scrapheap material (as I thought he was this summer, boy was I proven wrong!)
There are, perhaps, a handful of Premier League footballers who will take a powerful shot to the face and instantly get back up. I was beaming with pride when Dawson did so last night. A perfect metaphor for his attitude with the whole QPR situation. Don't do the cunty thing that 98% of self centred footballers would do and go into a strop, instead focus entirely on pushing back into the side, learning the new system and proving your worth. What a guy.
I gained an awful lot of respect for him this year, what he did in a sense of fighting back for a place is not easy, but defiantly commendable
Especially when you consider QPR paid, what £12.5m for Samba (unfit) and are paying him £100,000 week?
Ironic that the personnel to make it work was bought during and after his tenure. Hazard, Mata and Oscar pivotal.
I like to summarize AVB's gameplan as a "fencing-in" approach. The key aspects of his preferred style of play are a defensive line which presses high up the pitch, a proactive approach to winning the ball back when off of it, and wingers who often function more as cut-inside forwards with full-backs filling in the natural width. Walker certainly suits this system a lot better than you give him credit for for this reason.
I think that would be a pretty silly move of AVB to make his club captain one of the players who doesnt understand his philosophy..
:avbfacepalm:
Possibly. But it is also odd that he would try to sell his club captain at the beginning of the season...
Parker is good at husstling people off the ball on his own, the way we will hopefully play will see us do this in packs, meaning the need to be a good tackler is greatly decreased as the sustained and mounting pressure on the ball carrier will become too much for him and he'll make a wrong decision and hand it back to us.
I noticed one hack say that Chavs were now playing the expansionist game that AVB tried to impose but failed.
That got me wondering - can one of you clever strategists explain to me exactly what IS the AVB way - I tend to think of a high pressing game, but I suspect I miss the subtleties BIG time.
Secondly, which players do you all think are clever enough to understand what he wants and play to his instructions?
For me, Lloris, Vertonghen, BAE, Huddlestone, Bale, Adebayor, Carroll, Dembele, Gallas, Holtby
Definitely not: Walker, Dawson, Defoe
Not at all sure: Parker (thinks so sometimes) Lennon (evidence is weird), Dempsey (why else is he picked) Siggurdsson, Naughton, Caulker (thought he was, but why isn't he playing more?)
No doubt I have missed out your favourite player completely or downrated him :ade:
That got me wondering - can one of you clever strategists explain to me exactly what IS the AVB way - I tend to think of a high pressing game, but I suspect I miss the subtleties BIG time.
Secondly, which players do you all think are clever enough to understand what he wants and play to his instructions?
For me, Lloris, Vertonghen, BAE, Huddlestone, Bale, Adebayor, Carroll, Dembele, Gallas, Holtby
Definitely not: Walker, Dawson, Defoe
Not at all sure: Parker (thinks so sometimes) Lennon (evidence is weird), Dempsey (why else is he picked) Siggurdsson, Naughton, Caulker (thought he was, but why isn't he playing more?)
No doubt I have missed out your favourite player completely or downrated him :ade:
The high defensive line makes the pitch smaller in the opposition half. This enables the technically-superior team to have the advantage and ensures that the team with the ball doesn't have to move as much and enables the team to keep stamina going into the final portion of the game. It's pretty similar to what Ajax have been doing for years - keeping the ball in the opposition's half as much as possible in order to have a better chance of scoring.
About Parker. It makes him a very unimportant player, as he is quite useless at keeping possession and doing meaningful things with the ball when he has it. The whole plan behind the high pressing game is that you spend less time without the ball than with it, and to do that you need technically sound players who are able to recieve and pass under pressure, and that's not Parker by any stretch of the imagination.
True - I was thinking more of his ability to harry the opposition. And that is the part of his game which is missing this season.
We didnt try to sell him, we accepted an offer. There's a difference.