i know bray have been struggling with injuries recently but there has to be question marks over the number of players in the squad at the moment. it would seem to me a lot of money is being wasted on squad players. Perhaps its a case of going for quantity over quality. What do you reckon?
This is a list of players i can think of off the top of my head. All (i think) have first team experience of some sort, although i acknowledge that some have played very little.
O'Brien, Zayeed, McGrory, Grogan, Dunne, Flood. Colfer (played first team for UCD)
Plus:Under 21's (7 i can think of)
Willie Murphy, Darren Lacey, Wayne Byrne, Stephen Roche, Ryan Davis, Brian Gartland, Luke Nixon
Also i havent included the romanian player training with first team who i believe will become involved once he gets international clearance.
(In total there is 48 players listed above)
out of these 48 players there is very few players that are outstanding. perhaps only Zayeed, Lynch, Fox and Keogh. a lot of the other players are of the same standard. surely by getting rid of a few of the players from the wage bill, Pat could add at least one outstanding player (perhaps a striker) rather than signing five or six as he has done this week, who (McGovern apart) are not neccesarily better than what is in the squad already.
08/07/2005, 12:02 AM
Rocky Rules
48...
Your research is on the ball. Believe Romanian now involved
49 players - 2 teams.
Daft,I calls it!
08/07/2005, 11:05 AM
Roo69
I don't think many of the 21's players would be getting paid ? and if any of them are it would be very little, also a lot of the players in that list are not 1st team squad members IMO. At present i would consider this as 1st team squad regulars (they would have been in a few of the last squads)......
Keeper:
O'Connor
Defenders:
O'Reilly, Gifford, Tresson, McGovern, Davey, O'Hanlon, O Brien, Lynch
Out of these Long, Ryan, Fox, McGuinness, O'Reilly, Gifford, O'Hanlon, Lynch, Dunne have all been injuried over the last month. The way injuries have went over the last 2 seasons thank fcuk we have had a very large squad from both 1st team and 21's !
I think we also have a very young squad and given time and experience can gel into a very good side, Like for a lot of the younger lads this is there 1st full season in the premier division (O'Connor, O'Reilly, Zayed, James, Sinnott, Zambra, Dunne, Tyrell, + all of the 21's squad) and quite a lot of the others would only have limited premier league experience.
IMO, our 2 main problems are the back 4 keeping there concentration for 90 minutes and our chances to scoring ratio.
What ever back 4 we put out it looks solid enough on paper, like O'Reilly, Jody, McGovern and Davey is a young yet experienced back 4 with plenty of pace as well, they should be able to cope with most attacks but for some reason we keep getting caught out, lapses of concentration at key moments in all our games, i think if we can get this sorted out then we can really start to get going again.
Putting away our chances is another major concern of mine, we are just not clinical as other teams, we create quite a few really good chances every game yet we dont finish them, Drogs for example last wee had roughly 5 really good chances and they took 3 of them.
