Poborsky's hair
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- Oct 19, 2020
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Happy that someone else is trying fight this absolutely stupid bias toward one of our key players. I have been doing it for years for Fred and some other underappreciated players but perhaps using some more aggressive rhetorics which never worked on a football forum like this.It’s funny the way Fred so often gets singled out as a problem when the team as a whole is playing poorly. It’s a big factor in the whole “shite in the first half, world class in the second” meme. He’s so well established as a whipping boy the majority of the frustration which should be aimed at the team in general gets aimed at him, specifically. Throw in one or two obvious errors from Fred (over 45 minutes of football) and he’s immediately the worst player in the world.
In our last two matches ETH made half time tweaks that had almost nothing to do with Fred and the team performance improved dramatically, the feel good vibes began and suddenly everyone starts recognising all the good stuff that Fred is doing. I’m willing to bet that a statistical analysis of his performance in the first and second half of these matches would reveal nowhere near as much of a difference as you’d think.
All in all at least now having a world class manager can highlight the real value of some players and change their limited view. It really should stop the BS like: "He was good but..." "But it's Fred..." "Fred the enigma..." still I dont understand why a player must be shit in the first half, just because he's absolute world class in the second half. What are people trying to prove here?
Fred is one our best players not just a squad player, definitely in the context of subpar managers we have had before playing him out of position with overall inept tactics and worse performing players around him with the very best example of McTominay or Pogba playing next to him for so ling unable to fulfill basic midfield tasks...
He's doing it game by game and has to prove his worth and it only takes one bad pass or a game to take away all of his outstanding performances. Ridiculous. While this is absolutely normal with the world class players like De bruyne, Casemiro and others to have a bad pass or a bad game, we slate one of our most important players who's not flawless but give his all every game while providing excellent both defensive and attacking output week in week out.
Another myth which is very annoying is his shooting ability, of course, he is not Scholes to hit hard from midfield every time having a chance, but looking at how many chances "much better attacking players" like Bruno, Rashford, Ronaldo, Sancho have fecked up in shooting positionit's kinda crazy it's onyl Fred who's got the stick for it who wins 5 times more balls than them all together, which creates many turnovers and goalscoring opportunities.
Same goes with his passing, which is not flawless, but is at much higher tempo than others which keeps us ticking, is one touch most often and is not verydifferent to De Jong or Verratti. Those are very limited long passers who hardly break defenses with a long pass a la carrick or Scholes or Erriksen.
Those passes are rare anyway and overall contribution is not any better than overall contribution of Fred winning the ball high up the pitch and quickly passing through the lines at high tempo.
Fred is a lot like Park Ji sung in the overall contribution (and probably better) but he will only be judged positively in the long term if we have a success as a team and that's really annoying. because he often outperforms most of the players in the team even in the bad team spells and periods with bad managers in charge.