Abdul Fatawu ACL

[WestLothianFox]

On 29/05/2025 at 13:56, Free Falling Foxes said:

Indeed. We're a feeder club for Chelsea.  Just like Southampton are a feeder club to us. 

The difference is, Chelsea take our best players, and we take Southampton's shite

[OntarioFox]

On 29/05/2025 at 10:35, dooflip said:

I beg for a manager that isn’t afraid to get it forward quickly when it’s on. We want out Leicester back.

 

As much as I’m not a fan of the tippy tappy rubbish, it would be ok if it wasn’t so rigid. Keeping possession and looking for spaces to open up is fine. The problem is, it’s been so rigid that we never have players up the top end looking to beat the last man. We never play a quick ball forward, instead slowly passing it around whilst the opposition get back in to shape. The mind boggles.

Been screaming it into the void alongside yourself and many others pretty much since the decline post-FA Cup win. Possession isn't a dirty word - possession at the expense of everything else is. Okay, it's a dirty phrase but you get the jist. The best teams (Liverpool and Man City domestically, but there are examples all over the top leagues) play a hybrid style nowadays where they can both hold the ball and then spring a quick break once the opposition presents a gap. I actually think, when we played well, we saw that under Enzo. It's what Vestergaard, for all his shortcomings, was most important for - feeding the channels and putting us on the front foot once the opponent went to sleep from our boring hypnotic sideways passing.

 

Just because we don't have peak Vardy anymore doesn't negate the fact that in Fatawu, Ricky P, Bilal, Mavididi, even Thomas and Justin on their day, we have pace to burn, certainly at second-tier level at least. We shouldn't be blind counter attack merchants, but we have the players to at least make it part of our game. The problem is that we haven't bothered to do so except on rare occasions since the title win.

 

I'm going to pretend Daka doesn't exist, but he was signed to do that too. Which sums up what a joke our scouting has been for the past few years, if we were hell-bent on moving away from relying on raw pace. Of course we'd go for a player who has nothing else in his locker.

 

It's criminal that we've not utilised the team's other strengths properly for the best part of half a decade. Even when we did (West Brom at home springs to mind) we had Rodgers publicly dragging the team for daring to deviate from the slow and steady anti-football. Ultimately, if you can't execute that change of tempo, possession footy is utterly pointless, and you see a steep decline in the quality of play and ultimately the results (Claudio, Puel, Rodgers all saw this, and so did Enzo from February onwards - he was just lucky it took us seven months to get figured out).

 

 

Edited 31 May 2025 by OntarioFox