Barry was a strange one... he could be amazing, downright brilliant at doing the simple things... but somehow that didn't make him consistent. I used to get wound up because he would almost never hit the front men with a pass, which with his ability, was very disappointing. Vieira got slaughtered by fans but whenever he came on for Barry you'd see us move up the pitch because of the way he could selectively play the ball forward, or even just carry it a few yards forward. Also, with the best will in the world, Baz was an inert lump, and too often caught acting defensively a fraction too late. He gave away a lot of free kicks in dangerous positions, I seem to remember their being quite a few in crunch periods of big games. I think he gave the ball away in dangerous situations in a couple of big games as well. For a 'conservative' ball player, and a defensive presence in the team, it used to make me furious. But even I'll admit, he did a huge amount for the team as we broke through to success. And the flip side of him being a lump meant he was probably as good at shielding the ball as anyone I've seen.
De Jong used to get slaughtered for never passing forward, but I remember being obsessed by the maps of passes made by players that were on the guardian website back then, and his and Barry's usually looked all but identical. De Jong being over-rated was part of what made him useful. He had that aura of a predator, you could see opponents thinking about dribbling, or carrying the ball to find an angle... realising NDJ was sizing their legs up, 'nah...don't fancy any of that, I'll just get rid of this round thing ASAP'. I think he had to go because of the World Cup incident. We were building an image, and that incident, along with the Ben Arfa injury, however lacking in true viciousness or endangerment both incidents were, meant his face didn't fit. He was also rapidly losing the agility that for a period made his (wholly legitimate) ball winning skills look freakish.
