by bigmick » Fri Jun 26, 2009 4:12 am
It's a shame that you've "had your fill" of suggestions that keane was hard done by Doc. Best bet is not to read the comments I reckon.
The truth of the matter in my opinion is that Keane's treatment at the hands of the manager was nothing short of ridiculous. He started slowly, as players often do, but it is the managers job to use whatever assets are at his disposal to their maximum in ordere to facilitate an attempt to win trophies. Ten minutes of watching N'Gog play should have been enough to convince anyone that it was in everyone's interests for Keane to find some form just in case Torres got injured. Now in order to help a player find form, you can cajole, you can bullsh!t, you can put your arm around his shoulder, you can praise him up. Basically, whatever it takes to get him to play well was worth it, particularly given the vulnerability of Torres's fitness.
Instead, we allowed ourselves to get embroiled in a power struggle over who actually gave the final go-ahead to pay the fee, and the good of the team was sacrificed IMHO in order to make a point. The time to have arguemnts about the size of the fee and who gave the go ahead to actually pay it, was at the very earliest just before the transfer window, and in all likelyhood at the end of the season.
So as I say, it's the managers job to get the players to play somewhere near their maximum. I've listed a couple of ways which that can be made more likely, but we didn't do those. On both of the occasions when Keane scored two goals in one match, we hauled him off and dropped him in the next match. Now had he have played in the next match, there is a chance that he would have scored again and got himself on a roll (particularly as one of the games in question was against Newcastle).
Instead though, we decided to do everything we could to ensure the player lost any confidence he had. Even worse than that, much worse than that in fact because I don't give a feck about Robbie Keane, was we then decided to sell him without bringing in a replacement. the result of that was we then had to play Torres in virtually every match (amaziong for an arch rotationer to put himself in that position) despite the fact that he patently obviously wasn't 100% for some of the matches.
It amazes me that people offer up Torres being injured for much of the season as a viable excuse for us not winning the title (it's a good reason too) and then are prepared to completely write off the importance of the way we treated a bloke who we signed for 20 million quid for the express purpose of covering for such an eventuality. It's not about whether or not Robbie Keane is worth 20 million quid, whether or not he is a good player or any of that stuff. We NEEDED him to play somewhere near the potential of his ability, and fecking him about was never likely to achive that. His form at Spurs since doesn't demonstrate that he's actually a sh!t player, it merely conforms how completely we destroyed him.
Last edited by
bigmick on Fri Jun 26, 2009 4:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
"se e in una bottigla ed e bianco, e latte".