Boro fans on Butterfield..

Dear oh dear.

 

Must be hard to type in that straight jacket. And you're also getting free wifi in that asylum too!

 

Who can blame any player for leaving? A good career in football is 15 years - if you get paid an average of £10k a week for 10 of those years you'll have earned over £5m. If you're sensible with it you might never need to work again. If you're a 18-21 year old lad and a team comes knocking who play in the PL and will give you £10k a week instead of £3k, it's hardly a decision you need to think about. Especially if they offer you a 4 year deal! That's £2m guaranteed!

The alternative is to stay at Barnsley, on £3k a week and hope that this good form isn't just a flash in the pan. Or that some horrible bugger doesn't try to end your career whilst your contract hasn't been renewed.

If I was a footballer, I would have moved to a bigger club, with better players, who offer more money, and more security. But let's not forget "loyalty" eh?

 

So long as he has an absolute stinker against us, i wish him all the best. Shame it hasn't worked out the way he had hoped, but for me he made the wrong move at the wrong time. I still think he'll eventually have a crack at the Premier League, I just think he jumped too soon.

 

I'd love him to be at Oakwell. The problem is he'd be played wide left.

 

Good point.

 

Well said. Just a shame some people are too thick to see this.

 

We've got a player that is very similar in Mellis, albeit slightly different in terms of not having had the opportunity of a side built around him yet. But if we've got him playing wide there's nothing that makes me think the same wouldn't happen to Butterfield. Which is exactly what Robins got hammered for - playing him wide.

 

Give over Mellis no where near as good as Butterfield IMHO not got the workrate / shooting ability / positional sence and most of all the Heart which is the main Issue with Mellis to all the Fans who sit around us on Matchdays !!

 

Mellis is Butterfield before Keith took over. In and out of the side, asked to play wide, not given a proper run etc.

Put him behind O'Grady in a 451 and then compare them.

 

I don't buy in to the theory that Butterfield had a team built around him. Not in the slightest. It's been repeated so often on here that it's become a fact without anyone ever bothering to challenge it.

Butterfield played well under Keith Hill. The best football of his career so far. Some of that was down to Keith, some of it wasn't. Keith played him regularly, in a position that suited and no doubt coached him well. But Keith was also fortunate to have come to the club when Jacob was ready for a full season of first team football. He was fitter and stronger than he'd been before and with some experience behind him was comfortable playing in the first team. We have to thank the coaches and previous managers for that who brought Jacob on slowly without chucking him in to the deep end and ruining him when he was too young to handle it.

So Keith found he had a good player on his hands and used him in a position that he thought would be effective. I don't rate Keith that highly, but I don't think he's a complete mug. If you've got a good player, you play him where you think he will do well. That's a long way from building a team around a player.

Perkins, Drinkwater, McNulty and Wiseman all played as many games as Butterfield in the first half of Keith's first season in charge. You could just as easily say Keith built a team around one of those players. The fact that Butterfield excelled in that position and caught the eye doesn't mean the team was set up just for him. Perkins and Drinkwater were just as vital as Butterfield in midfield and played in a position that really suited them. Anyway, it wasn't until we started playing Davies and Vaz Te regularly that we actually started looking good. It could be said the team was built for them. But it wasn't. It wasn't built for any player. Keith just played the best players he had in the positions that suited them most. Like all half decent managers.

As far as Mellis goes, he's capable of some very good games. He looks like Butterfield did when he first entered the team: good but inconsistent. Thing is, Butterfield was much younger. I was hoping by this stage in his career Mellis would be putting in those sort of performances week in, week out, like Butterfield was before the injury. I do accept though that playing him on the wing all the time doesn't help him.

 

Completely agree, I suppose my point around building a team around him was that Hill saw he was fantastic at certain things but weaker in others. It seemed that with the system and importance we put on Butterfield that he was making up for his weaknesses with the likes of Drinkwater & Perkins in the middle to do a bit more of the graft.

I know Butterfield also put the graft in but we all know his strengths were further up the field and we recognised that and hada system that allowed him to do it. My concern is that with Mellis it's exactly the same yet he's pushed out wide.