Heh. You can cut the cognitive dissonance in this thread with a knife.
There's a bunch of people who firmly believe that:
- Fellaini is not good enough to keep Hererra out of the team on merit.
- Van Gaal would not make mistakes in his team selection.
Only, both of those statements can't be true at the same time so they're desperately clinging to this idea that Hererra is somehow unfit to play. Still unfit to play, 7 weeks after an injury which was sufficiently healed 3 weeks after the original incident for the medical staff to allow him to start a competitive game. I mean, come on!
He fractured a rib. Broken bones usually take 4 weeks or so to heal. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. In a young, fit adult who got an un-displaced fractured of a bone with a good blood supply that timeline could be as short as 2 or 3 weeks. Which obviously happened here. There's no way he would have been allowed to start against WBA without x-ray evidence that the fracture had fully healed. Would be negligent to do otherwise as you'd be risking a ruptured lung, or worse. It's possible he still had a bit of soreness in the area at the time, hence the corset. Which would have been intended for psychological, as much as physical, protection. When you break a bone, it forms a callus around the fracture point. Which actually makes it thicker/stronger than it was before. Absolutely no chance that he re-fractured his rib in that game and it wasn't as though he broke down, anyway. He was subbed off at half time.
Plus you have the fact he's been on the bench in every game since WBA. Which again, goes completely against this idea that he somehow made his injury worse on his comeback. You just don't put players on the bench who have an injury that is not properly healed, as it would be beyond stupid to risk calling on a player who will be inhibited by his injury and unable to perform or at risk of aggravating the injury and need to be subbed off not long after he came on. The only time you get players on the bench who a manager would ideally prefer to start would be in scenarios where they've been out for a while and their stamina might not be up to scratch. They wouldn't be able to last the full 90, so makes sense to keep them on as an impact sub. Of course, Herrera hasn't even been getting minutes off the bench!
It's blatantly obvious that, right now, Van Gaal thinks Fellaini is a better option. If that forces any of you to reconsider your opinion on the manager or Fellaini, well tough. You either need to face up to this reality or keep living in denial. Because this thread has got an awful lot of people doing exactly that.
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