pommpey
THE FUTURE ... AS IT USED TO BE
- Banned
- #61
I love being at Bramall Lane. And I'm sure if I lived in Sheffield there would be a budget for a ST every year.
However it is what it is. There is no entitlement to superior opinion if you're sat at home watching it on your phone or sat behind the dugout in BDTBL. I acknowledge that. It's a shame some others see their presence at games as a mark of qualification and credibility and readily weaponise that spitefully when they see 'an outsider' criticise a player they like. It's almost personalised. It was at it's worst with Norwood when he was picked yet game after game showing real liability in the middle of the park. 'What fucking game were you watching?' was the usual response. 'Norwood was fucking immense' yet all I saw was him coughing up possession and doing the hackneyed old move of receiving the ball off Egan and booting it out to marked wingbacks. Yet it's as though Norwood had fifty dads on here, all ready to pitch in and defend their son's integrity. It's somewhat strange now to see that at last we have someone who can play in his position (and fuck me hasn't Hecky dicked about with Doyle before biting the bullet and finally dropping Norwood and putting the youngster in there?) there's a general appreciation of a central midfield playmaker who gets himself about, gets into tackles, breaks up play, moves with the ball and shows real capability and almost never wastefully whacks it over to Lowe or Baldock being closed down and having to come backwards. But over four years I have been watching Norwood do the same schtick from my TV screen and those at the game tell me I don't see what he REALLY does. When I ask, they come out with the same old tropes of him 'making the team tick' and 'when he plays well, United play well'. What is evident from my sofa is when teams like Burnley forgot to close him down and put pressure on him, he can appear to be mercurial, but every other time when teams close him down he's unproductive and frightened to take players on and eventually fucks up. Then they'll come out with 'stats' like 'successful passes made' like it means 'goals'. In truth most of these are triangular sideways and backward passes between he and the centre backs. The bloke can't put a killer pass in or is very hit and miss with his distribution into the box onto the heads of the strikers, Especially McB who is a good header of the ball (as we saw when Bash found him).
All in all, I still don't see why people who attend matches have such a bad opinion of those who watch it elsewhere and display an air of entitlement about 'the truth' in game. It's almost inverted snobbery. Sure, if I lived in Sheffield and chose to forgo every chance to be at Bramall Lane there's maybe a point but even then, there is no compulsion to go and similarly no rule on here that says 'no match write ups unless you attend or meet a general match attendance threshold'. Where do you go with that? Well, you alienate most every Blade outside reasonable reach of the ground and that is flatline discrimination.
pommpey
