KinkyKinkladze wrote:Just a note on Vinny. He was incredible with lescott. They worked because you had the animal style beast mode of Vinny and (Carl will love this) the calm measured approach from lescott. Where one would fail, the other would pick up the pieces. They worked very much like Rio and vidic did for the rags, and as horrible as it was, they were an incredible defensive pairing.
Since lescott has gone, vinny has looked good by and large with demi, but with bo mangles, he's been all over the place. And I reckon that's simply down to Vinny knowing mangala doesn't have "it" and is playing two defensive roles in his head. He doesn't appear to have the trust in him that he had in lescott.
I might be talking huge bundles of shit but that's how it looks to me. We need a more intelligent defender, not necessarily a beast but somebody who calmy reads the game, to compliment Vinny.
I haven't seen enough of denayer to know if it's him but I would be very tempted to make those two our centre back pairing for the season. I still think there's a top player in mangles, but I don't think he has the mentality for it. What I have seen of denayer, he looks years more mature than mangles has ever done.
Nah, the only reason Kompany looks better with Demichelis is that Demichelis covers for Kompany's mistakes better than Mangala does.
Check the stats and you'll see that our best CB pairing was Mangala & Demichelis last season . . add Kompany in and it was a disaster.
If we had De Gea and the rags had Hart, we'd be top with a 9 point lead and they'd be in 12th place - that's the difference between a 'good' keeper and a 'top class' keeper - 12 places - think about it.