Midfield Mystery

Thursday night’s match across the Tasman against the Kiwis would have to go down as one of the most boring in the short history of the A-League. Whose fault was this? The players? The referee? The coach? For once I will not be bagging the refereeing standard in the match and was just left asking more and more questions of Terry Butcher.

Basically Sydney’s midfield was non existent. I can’t really recall very many times that the ball actually went from defender > midfielder > forward. I can however recall plenty of “hoof and hope” that we were all so scared Butcher would bring with him.

By picking a central midfield combination of Milligan and McFlynn Butcher hasn’t done himself any favors in kicking the stereotype. Neither of these players are a true playmaker and neither have the ability to distribute the ball around the park. We have seen Milligan pass it backwards time after time this season but have yet to see him make many, if any, decisive throughballs or exciting passes. Please move back to defense where I believe your talents could be better exploited for the good of the team. McFlynn, last season’s ball wining machine, just doesn’t fit this mould either.

Talay on the other hand showed some signs of brilliance in pre season and surely would have been the one to shoulder the responsibility of ball distribution through midfield, exactly what we lacked.

Butcher has explained the combination as the midfield “battering rams” and has justified picking them together because we need points and not sexy football. I don’t think picking Talay instead of one of these so called battering rams and actually playing the ball through midfield would have hampered our chance for points and in fact probably would have seen Sydney open them up even more.

I can only hope this combination and tactic isn’t his favored one and it doesn’t continue down the weeks. Sydney are back on the winners list for now so please Butcher, in the weeks to come, give us something to watch!

And can someone explain to me why Sydney needed to go on with that time wasting corner garbage for the last 5 minutes? Not only was it a shit spectacle, Sydney were opening them up like a can on sardines and with Petrovski wasted sitting on the bench, should have gone for a killer than persist with that rubbish!

DANE