What good is going into a challenge and being out for 2 months. This tough guy mentality is silly. He needs to harass, which he does, he needs to tackle bette, which he doesn't, he needs clean up the # of simple passes he fumbles ( in fairness he has been loads better of late, and the rest? Just keep doing exactly what he is doing. He is a phenomenal talent.Needs to grow a set and stop pulling out of every challenge, makes navas look like a lion
What good is going into a challenge and being out for 2 months. This tough guy mentality is silly. He needs to harass, which he does, he needs to tackle bette, which he doesn't, he needs clean up the # of simple passes he fumbles ( in fairness he has been loads better of late, and the rest? Just keep doing exactly what he is doing. He is a phenomenal talent.
I don't think anybody is saying Navas is the better player but rather that when we play Navas he often gives the team more balance. Your best 11 players unfortunately don't always make your best team. Personally I'd play Silva in the middle, Navas on the right and then one of KDB or Sterling on the left.
Marc DegreyseWhich Belgian pundits are we exactly talking about here?
One guy talks about pass completion. The great thing about KDB is that he often tries for the killer pass which he is brilliant at and why he gets so many assists. His pass completion stats may therefore not look as good as someone who continually takes the easy option pass. He is the type of player that scares opposition fans to death.....and he's got a hell of a shot on him as well.
Some of the posts on here are creasing me up,he's one of the best players I ever seen put a blue shirt on,give it a rest.
Well he needs to improve his decision making as to when to go for the killer passes then because we can't afford him to keep giving the ball away all the time. For the record I think he's showing signs of doing this already, I'm just not having the notion that it's ok to go for the jugular every time even if it means giving the ball away constantly some games (united away for example).
He doesn't give the ball away every time though, that's the issue, it's not a fair argument as his passing is very good.
He gives away 1 in 4.
Let's drop him then and play Nasri when he's fit as he never gave the ball away. Personally it's evident we've moved on from the possession style of play and have gone for a more direct approach hence the signings of Delph, Sterling and De Bruyne.
Guardiola, like anyone with half a brain, knows that statistics do not define football and will not give a shit that De Bruyne only has a 73.8666% pass completion rate.
At the moment we seem to be stuck with some players struggling to move on from a possession based game to a counterattacking one. De Bruyne constantly looks for that pass to split the defence in two and the only thing Guardiola will have to teach him is when to not do that. As a result, we'll see him give the ball away fewer times and hear less complaints from the disciples of Opta.
You don't need Opta to tell you that he can give the ball away on occasion that leads to counter attacks against us, you can see that from just watching him play. It's the nature of his game, he's a risk taker. In some games this can be a problem as we need to keep possession to take the sting out of the opposition.
Why is it that we can't acknowledge facts without the patronising retorts?
What? I agree with you; Pep's ideology about the first 2/3rds of the pitch being his would require De Bruyne to concentrate and be more consistent with those simple passes.
My issue is with the amount of statistics and numbers being thrown about which don't really amount to anything. Even if Kevin does pick up accuracy with those easy passes, chances are he will still give it away a lot in the final third because that's the way he plays. As a result, his passing accuracy will never be the highest because he would have to stifle his natural talents to do that.
Apologies if I took it wrong, it seemed like you were having a go with your Opta disciples remark.
I can't agree that the numbers don't amount to anything, stats shouldn't be just dismissed out of hand, they are relevant despite them not being the be all and end all.
Obviously the score at full time is a pretty important statistic but I think that on the pitch, if something is not apparent without looking at the figures, there are more important things to attend to. Thing's like KDB's pass completion rate don't need to be looked at from a statistical perspective as it's apparent to any impartial viewer that he plays too many sloppy passes which should be simple for such a brilliant natural player. But he also has a huge number of assists over the last two seasons and that would contrast massively with someone like Nasri who will have a higher pass completion rate but far fewer direct contributions to goals.
Losing my point here but I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can tell who the best players are from watching the game whereas, if someone handed you a sheet of numbers, you'd just be making an educated guess.