At long last i have started to read others agreeing with me "sell players for millions and replace with freebies". Power has literally sold every player worth watching and replaced with utter dross.
The players are not dross. If you'd said at the end of last season we'd have a front-line of Thomas, Ajose and Obika to choose from, managed to keep Kasim, Louis Thompson and Turnbull (who most of us thought would be playing for championship clubs), signed Robert, Traore and Ojaama on permanent deals, and added in Stewart, Williams and Vigouroux from Liverpool, I'd have said we had the basis of a very good side.
Remember Bournemouth a few years back? Languishing at the bottom of the table under Paul Groves, with a squad that should have been very good on paper. Looked utter dross to a man when they came to the CG that season. Ended up finishing in the autos after getting in a decent manager. Southampton had a similar turnaround under Nigel Adkins, and Norwich under Paul Lambert, after the previous manager had contrived to lose 7-1 to Colchester with what turned out to be a championship winning squad.
Sometimes good players look like dross when playing the wrong system/ lacking confidence/ being poorly trained/ managed. I posted a link to a German article not long ago, about how the English obsess too much over players when things are going wrong. You could put Vincent Kompany into our back-line right now and we'd still leak goals in defence.
Do you think Burton and Walsall, at the top of the table, really have the best players in the division? Or are they simply better-organised, better-motivated, and playing with more confidence than everyone else at the moment?
If, however, it really is Power who's insisting we stick to the passing game, having focused all our resources on attackers, then I agree he
IS culpable for our poor form and performances. For the passing game to work you need to be able to flood midfield, where our talent was concentrated last season. Now it's concentrated in attack.
You can't play two midfielders, as we did at Blackpool after Robert's injury, and four attackers, and still try to dominate possession. Until someone realises that, and sets us up as a counter-attacking side, which is what the playing squad is best suited to, then we probably are fucked for the foreseeable future.