Today's
Guardian article on Bordeaux the champions includes the almost inevitable sentence ;
"Centre-back Souleymane Diawara is unrecognisable from the defender who floundered at Charlton two years ago."
And once again it reminds me how difficult it is for us fans to rationally assess what we see on the pitch. These are just some of the confusing thoughts that simple sentence provoked in me:
1. Dowie had spotted a genuinely good footballer.
2. The only concrete criticism RM made of Dowie was re the Diawara signing
3. Carson - Diawara -Darren Bent ; that is the spine of a good Premiership team
4. Will we see a similar story with Mootoo?
5. Diawara's bad moments really happened.
6. On the other hand, any remember Sir Steve Brown, home to Southend one Tuesday night, 0-3? ripped to pieces by somebody called Andy Anson
Confused? I am...
Comments
That is a good spine, but Diawara had to play alongside Hermann/Elkak for most of the season. Bent got little support up front and Carson was helpless at times due to the way the defence played in front of him.
1. The French league is utter crap compared to the Premier League. That may have helped him a bit.
2, Diawara looked very average in the last African Nations Cup.
3. We'll see what he's really all about in the Champions League next season.
4. How much is that Champions League clause worth to Charlton?
That's about it.
Carson has been relegated twice and wasn't offered a deal by Villa or Liverpool. Good but not that good.
TEK and Herman both proved that they could hold their own in the Prem over a number of seasons
Steve Brown wasn't really Prem class but he never gave up and I doubt he ever got arrested for drunk driving, was found drunk in the gutter or turned up for training drunk.
I think it was Andy Ansah?
It's time you got over this episode in your life Henry and moved on.
I'm looking forward to repeating it in France in a few weeks time : - )
That he's gone to Bordeaux and has won paudits suggests that he returned a better player.
Diawara was a good player who made mistakes. The reason he made mistakes was probably because he was playing in a different league / style and speed of play to which he was accustomed, and his finding his feet season was conducted amid a struggling side.
However, he also made off-field mistakes that would have alienated himself to some at the club.
A couple of years on and we are seeing the whole process repeated with Moo2.
What can we learn from this ?
That there are of wealth of talented players around the globe who can equally do a job at our level. However, finding those with the right character is essential, and gelling our next team together has to be done with players with the RIGHT ATTITUDE to work their nuts off as a team unit. Who are prepared to learn, scrap and fight for each other.
There have been too many divisions within our squad within the last few years, largely i believe to not enough attention paid to the characters we have signed and how well they will fit into a squad ethic. That has to change.
Thanks, I stand corrected. On the night, Steve Brown played like he'd turned up for the game drunk, as did most of the rest of 'em.
It's all a bit mute anyway, as Pardew said all along he wanted to keep him - I think Souley and his agent engineered the move rather than the club actively looking to sell, although, as usual, we probably could have tried harder to keep him.
I think losing him late in August was as big a blow to the first half of our season as selling Reid was to the 2nd half. Souley and Boogie always had the makings of a good pair who's strengths and weaknesses would have completmented each other, imo, and who knows, perhaps we'd have been higher up in Jan, have kept Reidy as a result and pushed on to promotion instead of falling away.
You can say what you like about the relative standards of French and English football, but I can gurantee you Bordeaux would never consider buying McCarthy, Fortune or Sodje.
I agree with you. But its interesting to consider what that 'squad ethic" consists of. I'm just wondering whether as a club we failed to have an ethic that got the best out of players from different countries and backgrounds. According to Henry, Diawara had a drink problem. Well so do a lot of players. I seem to recall that both Luke Young and Jon Fortune have been done for drunk driving. Perhaps the only difference is that they drink with the rest of 'the lads'. One thing we've established about Mootoo is that he doesn't drink at all. And maybe that's part of his alleged "attitude problem"
He then settled domestically and improved hugely as a player to the point where he was playing for England.
So maybe it was time, maybe it was Curbs famous man management skills, maybe it was the love of a good woman. Who knows?
I think there are plenty of examples of overseas players taking time to adjust to English football and culture. Drogba is one. Maybe with time Diawara would have settled in his second season. We'll never know. Perhaps it is telling that no other English clubs had bought him before and none have bought him since. Moo2 has been here for two years yet doesn't seem to have settled in the way that Racon, Youga and Semedo have. Different people, different luck, different attitudes perhaps.
Still, it seems the euro/£ exchange rate has done us one small favour on Diawara's transfer.
McL....It wasn't Varney...I think you meant to say Murray.
Well I agree with all that. But I often worried that we bought players without sufficiently scrutinising them as people. So perhaps Diawara didn't have the right mentality to make it in England. Or at least that little corner of England which is CAFC.
Watch a lot of it, do you? I probably wouldn't put money on Bordeaux to see off Chelsea, but against Villa, Everton, Spurs, et al, for sure I would. And we aspired to be in that group, but got relegated instead...
He said it after the Wycombe game when Diawara was truely terrible, got turn inside out by Easter and not only for the goal and prompted the "you're not fit to wear the shirt" chant
I think Curbs did look hard and very long at personality. Sometimes too long.
I don't think Bob Dowie or Pardew did.
As AFKA said, we need to get back to that and quick.
Heard that Luky Young organised a christmas bonding drink up, that season, and only Andy Reid turned up out of the 1st team squad.
I think that was earlier in the season (at TGI Friday's in Covent Garden) and a number of first team players were on international duty and couldn't make it.
Really? Danny Murphy? Francis Jeffers?? Marcus effing Bent ?????
I could imagine Danny Murphy charms people, and hides his stroppy side, but you're telling me that Curbs thought Bent had the "right" personality, and not a shred of doubt that might have caused him to ring up one of the 6/7 managers who'd previously sold him before Moyes?
Think it kind of shows why English clubs don't just go out and buy loads of cheap foreigners (compared to English players), they don't always adapt to the country, as well as the football. Probably simpler to find someone English, who perhaps isn't quite as good, but you know you should get something out of them a lot earlier on.
I remember his first few seasons, didn't think he was worth £4m (which he wasn't at the time), made too many mistakes, wasn't consistent enough.
With him part of it was just him being a young defender that wasn't scared to make mistakes. I remember the sort of mistakes he made, things like giving the ball away trying to pass it out and giving it away. I think he cut that out with experience, started making the right decisions, concentrating better etc.
Cranie made similar mistakes for us, not saying he'll be as good as Young but with more experience he'll develop into a more reliable player.
And it must have been a different JFH that Curbs wanted to buy...
Good sides rarely happen, buying players in the first place with the right attitude makes a difference but the great side that Curbs managed between 2000 and 2003/4 evolved over a number of years and in our last couple of seasons in the Prem that team had broken up and we were buying players to fill holes rather than with a team structure or ethos in mind.
That's when he tried to push us that little bit further, signing supposed better players from bigger clubs. Same with when we signed Rommedahl.
He signed plenty of players that had the right personality more than the ones he didn't.
Don't forget the context in which Curbs bought Bent M.
He had developed a 4-5-1 system which (love it or hate it) was relatively successful. The key man, Shaun Bartlett, then suffered a longterm injury. Curbs had part of a January window to find an adequate affordable replacement.
In those circumstances it was no surprise that his player research was not as thorough as usual.