James McCarthy

horsebox wrote: Our midfield has been ineffective for years even when McCarthy was playing too.

Green Devil wrote: horsebox wrote: Our midfield has been ineffective for years even when McCarthy was playing too. And I said as much in my above post. In terms of team units I don't think anyone could deny that our midfield unit is the one that's under-performing most currently? One simply can't point to the fact that we're not conceding and say that's Whelan exempt from criticism. When looking at clean sheets and so forth it's your goalkeeper and defence that deserves most of the praise in that regard, given the way we play our holding midfielder is merely just a small cog on that side of things.  Hendrick and Hourihane aren't getting enough support behind them to push further forward as they know Whelan hasn't got the legs (which isn't his fault he's 35) so there's part of our attacking threat negated. Whelan also tends to stay very close to our centre backs when out of possession, so you'll often find the two lads ahead of him chasing shadows. (again he hasn't got the legs) If Whelan starts in Slovakia, I really hope he can have a positive impact on the team and I'll support him as I would every other player. I also don't think by starting James McCarthy we will suddenly become favourites to beat Slovakia either, but I think we'd be slightly stronger as a team with him in it.

But when Whelan was taken out of the team, results or performances didn't really improve.

Left foot wrote: pre Madonna wrote: Conan wrote: McCarthy has contributed even less than Whelan at international level to be fair. Because he hasn't played for us so long people forget just how utterly ineffective he was 90% of the time and he becomes mythologised as some kind of invincible midfield general. Our players tend to get much better the less they play.  They seem to get worse the more they play too.

Some of those games are from over 4 years ago .

His last 2 games were his 2 best 2 of the campaign.

Your right he did.

I thought we played well against the Danes.

Over the course of the tournament we have been poor, no doubt about it. I'd have expected better.

We need to go for it, similar to what we did against the Danes. Leave nothing on the pitch, take risks.

Long has to play, at least at some stage of the game. For once, we have
our strikers scoring goals, something we didn't have for our previous games.

The starting line up - apart from our strikers kinda picks itself and I wouldn't be afraid to use Jack Byrne from the bench if we are losing the game.

SuperDave84 wrote: d13dave wrote: Whether he is committed or not is not really the point, he is shutting down the idea of playing a central midfielder playing in the premiership regularly and competently for a stalwart playing out the final days of his career two tiers below. Nail on the head. It's utterly bizarre and an absolute abdication of his responsibility to ensure the team is ready when Kenny takes over.