Lord Doogle wrote:
He identified the need for height and strength but just didn't work out despite his best efforts.
You see I just don't get this argument. We're not playing in the conference. Nine times out of ten, the team who win a football game are the team with the best footballers and more skill/quality. It almost feels like RN's recruitment strategy was based on the tallest players he could buy -- not the best ones.
The only time when I think there is some logic behind it is the argument that teams with more height tend to score the most from set-pieces, yet seeing as we've been absolutely dire from them this season, it isn't necessarily the case and you need only look as far as the Premier League: Arsenal aren't the most physically imposing side yet top the league in terms of goals scored from set-pieces with 11, they score them due to very good delivery from Oezil and clever runs and tactics from them, not just having players who are two inches taller than the opposition on the pitch and just assuming that automatically gives you an advantage.
We got promoted with some physicality in our side obviously, as McFadzean and Kay were tough centre-halves, and Afobe wasn't exactly weak, however, I think that RN's focus on physicality and some of our fans obsession with it (like OTD, who constantly harped on about it) has been thoroughly disproven; the best players win football games, not the strongest. I'm not saying that a bit of resilience and strength doesn't help, but RN's height and strength based recruitment policy has clearly fallen flat. Maybe it would have worked 10 years ago, but League One is a much better footballing division that it has been previously, I'd even go as far to say that the football played in League One is better on the eye than in the Championship, where RN's approach might have been more successful as many teams, most notably Warnock's Cardiff, have their physical strength as their best asset.
I think that such recruitment is the key failing of the Neilson era. Would we really have signed the likes of Ngombo, Muirhead and Tshibola if they weren't taller than six foot two? I doubt it, and they were/are complete and utter shite. The fact is, our promotion team had significantly less physicality than our current one, yet it wouldn't really make a difference, would it? If we played our promotion team right now, regardless of how easily Cissé would win a header against Reeves, or Ebanks-Landell would bully Grigg off the ball, they'd absolutely fucking batter us. We didn't need to sign stronger players, we needed to sign better ones.