Originally Posted by
Emmet7
I am going to put you on ignore now because it's blatent you know nothing about football.
Andews was our best player in the first half, he did his job, the job he was asked to do, supurbly. He closed down, he put in two supurb crunching tackles in a row on one occassion, do you remember that. He was faultless in the first half. He put his body on the line time after time such as when he was elbowed in the face.
In the second half he tired but was still ok. Anyone who says Andrews was poor in the first half is an idiot and not worth listening to and i don't care who they claim to be. There are a lot of idiots with no knowledge of the game in Ireland masquarading as experts.
Doyle is not up to the task of delivering us a goal. I can explain the technical reasons but I doubt a person of your limited intellect would understand, but for the benefit of others, Doyle receives the ball 90% of the time with his back to goal. That makes the job of scoring much more difficult. The best way to score as a forward is facing goal and running onto a ball, usually over the top or else run onto a knockdown as Keane did in Bari and when he was facing goal. Letting Doyle have the ball to his feet and facing away from goal is pointless. What will he do? Lay it off to some other player of limited ability? Who then lashes a high ball into the box with only Keane to compete against two tall centre backs.
People say Doyle is good at holding the ball up and waiting for suppport. Again that's no use to us. When he holds it up like that, he also holds it up for the French defence to get back into position. That's one of the reasons Doyle is so easy to counter. He has lost a few yards of pace with injury and can't run onto a through ball, hold off players with his strength and score. It won't get any better in the next 3 days.
But of course people like Den Perry have no interest in the technical side of soccer. They are more interested in listening to journos and parroting their obsession with Andy Reid.
Andy Reid would be useless without quick strong forwards to run onto his passes. He has strong forwards to run onto his passes at Sunderland and who are lethal finishers. He has Kenwan Jones to aim his crosses at. We don't have that at Ireland. We don't have any clinical fditers. Our system is not set up to allow our forwards score in big games. They have only scored one between them in our 7 biggest games, and even that was scored when Doyle wasn't on the field.
