Woah woah woah...
I can’t have this ‘we need another CB to replace X, Y, Z’ chat. It just can’t be the default solution to this problem.
We’ve got Lovren, Skrtel, Sakho, Toure, Ilori, Wisdom, Gomez, and probably someone else I’m forgetting about to work with. There’s a CB pairing in there somewhere. And that’d all you need; a pairing. Not a triumverate, not a rotating wheel of them, just two blokes who can play togethor. Vidic and Ferdinand, Hyypia & Henchoz, Terry & Cahill, etc etc. They don’t have to be similar, in fact it’d be better if they weren’t. They just have to compliment each other, know each other, and build an on-field relationship. I don’t give a fuck who they are, just pick them,educate them, and let them learn.
Let’s have a look at the CB pairings that finished above us last season;
Terry & Cahill
Koscielny & Mertesacker
Jones & Smalling
Kompany & Mangala
And whomever Spurs had.
Bar Terry, there’s not a world class defender in that list. Bar Terry & Cahill, there’s not even a decent pairing in that list. Outside of Chelsea, they’re all fucking meh-level ordinary. And they finished above us.
No one is going to convince me that Gary fucking Cahill is any better than what we’ve got in our list of centre-backs. But he’s a premier league winner, and he contributed to clean sheets last season. Why?
Because he’s in a side that values defending. Fuck knows why more don’t. Had Wenger and Arsenal valued it at all in the last 10 years, they’d have a handful of titles. But they don’t. They value dainty number 10’s, and open expansive football. League titles? Zero.
John Terry will be 35 this year. His peak was probably 7 or 8 years ago alongside Carvalho. Why is a 35 year old, who peaked in the last decade still the best centre back in the country??Because he lives and breathes defending. If there are 5 choices he has to make at any one moment in time, you can guarantee that doing the right thing defensively will be in the first 4. Playing his way out of a situation will come last in that list. It’s first in our list. It’s the default route coached by Rodgers; 'can you play your way out of this?’ At what point do we acknowledge that it isn’t working? Do we not analyse the league table and see the monumental goals against figure and think we should do something to rectify it?
Bad defending isn’t a blip with us, it’s us. So I can’t blame Lovren, or Sakho, or Toure or whomever, because laying the blame on one individual for our defensive woes is like blaming your radiator for global warming.
If you took Gary Cahill out of that Chelsea side and stuck him into ours, we’d be just as fucking shit. So it’s not a player issue, it’s one of coaching and mentality. You have to respect that defending is critical, and you’ve got to teach it. You can’t keep spending 20M every summer on a centre back and expect things to improve automatically. Why not educate the fucking plethora of expensive ones you’ve already got?
Martin Skrtel’s been playing in the Premier League for what, 7 years? The guy actually does not know how to defend. It’s frightening. I watch him every week and marvel at how he’s managed to get this far at this level without the basic pre-requisites needed to function in a cohesive defensive structure. He can’t hold a line. Actually, fuck that, he doesn’t even know what a defensive line is. He’s reactive, he’s late, he’s never in control, and his positioning in play, and at man-marking and set-pieces is diabolical. I don’t blame him though, I blame the fuckers supposedly teaching him from Monday-Friday; what are they doing? And he’s emblematic of every fucker we’ve got. Lovren, Skrtel, Sakho, Ilori, Toure, etc – all International players. How is this possible?
If we taught them properly, and these cunts still turn out to be fucking useless, then fuck them off and buy replacements. No problem.
But let’s stop assuming that spending 20M every July to fix this issue that we’ve had for years is the answer, cos it clearly isn’t.
