Featured: That was the week that was (Jan 31 - Feb 5 2021

[tlw content]

 

Sunday Jan 31:

 

West Ham 1 L 3. Great stuff. Amazing goals, outstanding team performance and three points. Mo was on fire, Thiago is becoming more influential and what can you say about Hendo? What a man. What a captain. What a centre back. 

 

Milner joked afterwards that Hendo needs to be careful because if he keeps playing like that he’ll stay at the back. I could see that happening when he gets older but I can also see it happening in the next month or two because he’s at least as good as Fabinho and he might be better. He’s certainly more vocal and that’s going to be important if Phillips or Williams are playing. It would also allow us to get Fabinho back as the six.

 

On the transfer front it looks like we’re actually getting a centre half. Finally. Not someone that many would have expected but beggars can’t be choosers as they say, and bringing in one of the top defenders in the Championship whose playing style suits our game is about as good as we could have hoped for considering FSG are adamant they aren’t spending anything. 

 

Irrespective of who that player is (most of us wouldn’t have a clue who the best defenders in the Championship are), we’d all have taken that at this stage, right? Except the loons still demanding we pay £80m for Koulibaly or Upamecano.

 

This doesn’t come close to compensating for losing Van Dijk, Gomez and Matip (I doubt we’ll see him for a couple of months at best), but it does make us stronger because it’s another competent option and it’s a bit of depth. I say competent because I’m pretty sure that Ben Davies won’t be shit. He might not prove to be good enough in the long run, we’ll see, but he won’t be shit because if he was they wouldn’t have signed him. His name wasn’t plucked out of a hat, it was picked off a spreadsheet and signed off by Klopp.

 

He’s got 250 games under his belt in the football league. It’s not the Premier League but you learn an awful lot as a centre back playing 250 games at football league level. The fact he’s in the Championship doesn’t bother me as half the players he’ll come up against have played in the Championship. The gap isn’t as big as people make out. Leeds were in the Championship last year but their players don’t look out of their depth do they? 

 

Players develop at different ages, especially centre backs. Ben White was playing in the Championship last year but no-one would have bat an eyelid if we’d signed him as he’s seen as a great prospect. We don’t need a great prospect though, we need someone who can do a job now. Other players will have a higher ceiling than Davies but our priority needed to be who can help us the most immediately.

 

The fact Davies is 25 and not 22 is seen by some as a negative but to me it’s the opposite. You can ask “if he was that good why is he still playing at that level” but it’s not that simple. If he was 22 he probably wouldn’t have the experience or maturity to handle being thrown in at the deep end, unless he’d been playing every week from the age of 17. Davies has maturity which should help him adapt quicker.

 

He will have been way down the list of options and we’re only signing him because the price is right and we couldn’t get any of the preferred targets. Let’s not pretend otherwise. That doesn’t mean he can’t be a success here though.

 

This feels old school. I’m not talking about Clemence and Keegan from Scunthorpe, or Phil Neal from Northampton. For some reason the one that came to mind for me was David Burrows from West Brom. I had no idea who he was when we signed up but from his very first game I loved him. I’m not expecting Davies to be Alan Hansen but I’m confident he’ll be solid and will do what we need him to do because he’s got the skins on his wall.

 

If Rhys Williams had 250 professional games under his belt we wouldn’t need to sign anyone. Well, we probably still would because ideally we need to be bringing in two, but you get my point. I keep saying how experience is more important at centre back than anywhere else but ideally you also need someone with the skillset to play in your specific style (which by all accounts this lad has), so the signing of Ben Davies is fine by me.  

 

 

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[KMD7]

Fuck Guardiola is right.  

[StevieMax]

Baldiola was clearly "fed" the quote from Klopp as he had all his stats lined up as well as the hyperbolic 2months, 3 months crap in the responding interview.

[alles ist gut]

Top, top under-23s analysis there, Dave.

[ralph]

Fuck the dirty bat eater or fuck the despotic regime that created it to ravage mankind and fuck us all over.