by Ian Royal »
07 Dec 2008 12:51
Happily, Coppell won't drop Harper because some short sighted kids don't think he's very good, so there is no need to get wound up by this waste of space thread.
Why can't you people get your head around the way our central midfield is supposed to play and that Harper fits into this perfectly?
The whole purpose of our central midfield is to keep the ball moving when we have it and spread it out to the full backs and the wingers to get forward. They sit fairly deep protecting the back 4 because our full backs bomb forward so much. Occasionally one of them is supposed to get forward to support the attack by arriving late at the edge of the box unmarked.
When we don't have the ball they hassle the build up play of the other team and flood the defensive areas around our 18 yard box. We squeeze the other team so they make errors and give away the ball. If we could get hold of fit players who could pass and tackle we would be playing them, but we will be very very lucky to find anyone better at the central midfield role in our team than Harper. Certainly outside the Premier League and without paying several million pounds.
Matejovsky is an excellent player IMO, though he has shown very little to get people excited in his few cameos. He has shown flashes of brilliance with his passing, but has also shown that his tackling is even worse than Harper's (Harper at least knows not to make one if he can't time it properly) and he is sluggish to go with it. Gunnarsson would be an ideal player, if he wasn't in his mid thirties. He simply doesn't have the legs to play 90 minutes for several games. Karacan is inexperienced and Cisse is still improving from being worthless as a midfielder at the start of the season.
Cisse is currently undroppable because he is scoring and showing a lot of improvement. Harper is currently undroppable because the team is winning and he is central to the way we play. Matejovksy is in the sticky situation of not being capable of replacing Harper in the system we play, but not really being capable of playing alongside him either.
For Marek to play, we need to change our system to have 3 in central midfield. This won't happen because Coppell is a 4-4-2 man and sees 4-3-3/4-5-1 as a primarily defensive formation. I completely disagree with this. But it's not exactly a problem whilst we're keeping touch with the top 2.