This is the worst Barnsley side I've ever had the misfortune to watch and you can argue all day about who should start and who should be substituted but the truth is that out of the whole lot only Martin Crainie is good enough at this level.
Personally I would have taken Mellis off at HT and put mccourt out wide. Mellis has consistently failed when played out wide, he was the poorest of the midfield in 1st half. But I wanted to comment on Paddy specifically as he was the 'new' player in the side, after being frozen out under DW, so particularly topical. 'Significantly better' is overdoing it a tad though, they were all dogshit.
I thought paddy was better than Mellis or Woods though significantly is stretching it. In my opinion only Tompole or RNL have the pace to play off COG in that role.
maybe jennings or rose to play off ogrady too .with the players out injured and 3-4 players not performing , it could be a completely diff team we have to play saturday
I don't buy into the Paddy hype - and my brother dislikes him significantly more, but we were both in agreement that he was far superior to Mellis/Woods in the first half and extremely unlucky to be taken off.
really depends what you want from your no.10 if we want to hit it in the air to O'Grady for him to flick on then we have to start getting runners beyond him, no-one ever anticipates/is in a position to catch the headers he wins. If that was the plan then the no.10 would have to play as a shadow striker and requires pace a'la Cywka. if we want to give it to O'Grady to feet, then we need the the no.10 to be a playmaker type like McCourt who can pick a through ball but this means the wingers need to push on beyond the last man At the moment O'Grady is our only outlet and it's too easy to defend against, playing 1 up front will only work if you have runners going beyond the front man and we aren't making that happen currently. all this aside, whoever it is has to offer more than players have been recently. We're not creating anything at all.
Paddy was a pointless waist of a shirt tonight, as was Woods and Mellis to a lesser degree. We have more mid field players than any other position, and this still remains to be our downfall. Too many hearts like peas tonight, it appeared that we had lost before we went on the field, which I find unacceptable.
