What has been a massive disappointment for me is that for a play-making wide man, his usage of the ball and technical quality with it is appalling. A few have dug him out for his outright production numbers, and whilst they should be better, if they were excused by him being a string-puller who is opening up the field for others and being a masterful pre-assister, you’d get the reason why he could still be quality without amassing impressive outright goals and assists. I find his play-making ability to be shocking: pass selection; pass execution/acumen; reading of play; quickness of thought - he’s supposed to have #10 traits from the wing, but that part of his game is arguably worse than what he offers as a wide-forward or actual winger.
When he turns inside, it isn’t opening up the field for him and that isn’t making any sense. At those moments he’s on his best leg exclusively with as much time and space between he and opponents as he’ll ever be afforded in the PL, but there’s no feeling he can then manipulate the ball to do anything threatening with it off a pass… because his passing itself is very poor with, I think, the worst proficiency over distance after Pellistri (Who isn’t a playmaker, nor even going to want to attempt expansive passing over longer distance) out of all the other RW options.
Antony feasibly gets into the team because he keeps the width, ball carriage to alleviate pressure and bring others into play and then for his defensive qualities and tracking of runners, but as you say, if he cannot penetrate beyond a certain point, it’s a counter-tactic to be used to the opposition’s advantage as they can let him have the ball up to a certain point, and more importantly, have others in our team then initialise a break forward, potentially beyond him, then spring on him to cause the maximum amount of disarray in our side as then players aren’t set defensively and offensive spaces in those vacated pockets are there to be exploited.
What’s interesting in this league is how suppose strengths can be used against a side - for all the criticism our misfiring team gets, you can clearly see they are PL standard players I.e. McTominay is a goal threat, and if given too much of the ball in his threatening areas, there’s a high probability of him affecting the game. Same can be said of an out of form Rashford or Bruno having a really bad game; you can even say that if teams give Dalot too many long range opportunities, he’ll more than likely at least be a threat. Antony is rapidly losing that kind of aura and is being treated accordingly. If the manager is just going to persist with him irrespective of performance, he’s going to have to earn back some respect pronto otherwise he becomes a liability with no redeeming qualities.
I’ve been harping on about the importance of his overlapping FB in this thread, but that was in line with potentially turning him from average to whatever his top level can be, but currently, he is not a PL player, and as highlighted in the above paragraph, players who start for us, even at their very worst have an intrinsic value and certainty to the threat they carry. The same cannot be said of a wide attacker who: cannot beat a man 1on1; cannot playmake; struggles exceedingly to pass accurately whilst in motion; poor at crossing the ball and has no physical or athletic advantages. It’s a damning indictment, but you have to look at it objectively and then ask what attributes are left for a starting attacker, especially for a club expecting to compete for a CL spot every season. It would get to the point where if he has to field, a new position on the pitch would need to be eked out for him; some are saying FB, but he doesn’t have the attributes there either, imo.
I don’t want to write him off in the absolute sense, but if there’s no pick up or solution for him to find to be effective in this league, his days are going to organically be over soon enough anyway.
