[quote author=Ryan link=topic=37076.msg985893#msg985893 date=1257897767]
He's actually capable on the ball, his touch is good, and he's decent at retaining possession. The awry positional sense can be worked upon by decent coaching, gaining experience, and through continually playing with good defenders. Being short osn't the absolute end of the world - Evra, Neville, Cole, Jones, etc etc have all made it as full-backs regardless of their size.
His pace (and massive lack of it) is an enormous problem. He's wondefully slow, and most worryingly - he nearly always seems to be caught flat-footed, so the second anyone touches the ball past him, he's fucked. There's just not an awful lot can be done about that, cos he's continually going to get caught out. It'll invariably mean that our central defenders will have to spend most of their 90 minutes worrying about to cover for him, which can strecth the fuck out of us.
He'll get better of course, but to the levels we need him to be? Doubtful. In games like Monday night's where the opposition are little more than cannon-fodder, you need attacks and pressure coming from all areas of the park. Unfortunatly everything came down our right (due in part to the excellence of Johnson of course) but also because we couldn't get in behind them on Brum's right-side. It left us horribly unbalanced and predictable really. Losing Riera didn't help, having a slow-arsed left-back was a major problem though.
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True, there's not a lot that can be done for his outright pace although losing afew kilo's wouldn't hurt him any.
There is a bit could be done for his agility though and that's almost as important as pace in his position. The point of him being flat footed is very accurate - but this can be worked on. If he was in there doing some high interval work in tight areas mixed with plenty of flexibility work it would improve him immensely.
I think people like Insua would improve markedly by playing tennis or squash. Navratilova was one of the quickest players around a tennis court but while Steffi could get through the 50m in under 6 seconds, Martina rarely ever broke 7. But she was so agile it meant she had changed direction, balanced and running while most players were still looking for their feet. The result was she seemed amazingly quick around the court.
This is what Insua needs and with the sort of training drills they do for tennis players he'd improve markedly. He's never going to out pace Ronaldo over 60 yards or whatever but it's generally in those first few steps that Insua get's done and with better agility he could keep up duing that vital period.
