by muirinho »
02 Oct 2017 15:00
leon Woodcote Royal leon Give it a rest you little Englander. Yeah Wales aren't all world beaters - but football is about the team achieving greater than the sum of the parts. Something England have failed to understand for over 50 (FIFTY) years.
Gunter is OK. He's not the greatest but then, he plays for us. You can't fault his effort and yesterday wasn't the first time he's got back while the rest of the defence were standing watching and blocked/cleared the ball.
And sorry but McCleary looks fcuked. A shame because he was a match winner.
I couldn't agree more that England have massively under achieved over the years but if Gunter is the best right back Wales has to offer, remove Bale and you've got a national team that would struggle in the Championship.
Well Bobbs has pointed out a few flaws in your argument.
I'd say that it's not about the individuals it's about how they play as a team. And with football, the team is EVERYTHING. That's why Wales, Iceland, Denmark, Portugal etc etc can do well with a limited team and England and Netherlands (the two most underperforming sides ever?) fail every time.
Anyway Gunter works well in the Wales team that has done OK, so what is it that he doesn't do for Reading. I am struggling to pick him out as one of the worst performers. Afterall - he gets fcuk all protection from the midfield.
It's not so much what he doesn't do for Reading, it's what Reading doesn't do for him.
People mention about him not attacking "like he used to", or "like he does for Wales". Well that's because he spends half the game hanging about on the half way line, trying to stay onside, and waiting for somebody to chuck in a pass ahead of him, for him to run onto and cross. Find his heatmap on whoscored and I'll guarantee, he's in miles of space for lots of the game, and it's not being made use of.
Either the pass is behind him, or it's WAY in front, and he can't get there, or it's directly to him, but after waiting long enough for his opposite number to come and mark him. And since he's never been able to take on his man and beat him, that means he's going to have to pass again. He's also reasonably decent with one-two's - but again, if McCleary isn't playing, who's he going to have those with? No championship fullback's crosses are perfect but when he does cross, there's nobody there, so it wouldn't matter if they were amazing. Also, he's more inclined to overhit than underhit - why is the winger or full back on the other side not running in on the far side of the penalty area?
And as you've already mentioned - defensively, he's often horribly exposed by his midfielders (and this season, also by McShane being very wobbly alongside him).
So basically, he appears to play better for Wales because (a) Wales have better players than us - anybody who doesn't think so is deluded, and (b) they have a plan where everybody knows exactly how everybody else is going to play. We can't do anything about (a), but we should be able to do something about (b), and as far as I can see, we haven't had that since Coppell. Incidentally, I think if Gunter was transplanted into the 106 team, but played exactly the way he does now, he would be much better regarded.
All of our players have their faults. None of them can win a game singlehandedly. You could do a similar sort of analysis for any of them - they'd be better if their colleagues played to their strengths, or the formation was tweaked to suit them etc. It's not earth-shattering analysis
But yeah, he seems to catch way more than stick than he deserves, while other players get away with murder in comparison.
