If you want to turn it into a dick measuring exercise about who has been to the most games, well I have only missed Millwall, Bradford and Fleetwood all season. Not that it means anything.
You're right about Ryan Kent, people made the same lame arguments about him before he left, and how well have we done since then? Does we look more or less threatening going forward? Players who run at defenders create uncertainty and create space for others. We miss him. Get over it.
And I take it you missed the Peterborough game. Murphy ran riot in that second half. Did he score? No. Must have 'blunted' the attack then. Your last post should win some sort of award.
It only became a dick measuring exercise following your opening comment about me being an armchair pundit, so I'm not sure why you're trying to take the moral high ground.
The fact of the matter is, you could go to another 1000 games of football before the end of 2016 but if you say we miss Ryan Kent then that shows me why we can't agree at all on this.
Anyone in Sunday league standard can run at a defence and cause panic, but like pace, it has to be used intelligently, something Kent or Murphy does not have. How many times did this 'running at defences' cause panic? Almost never, because if you have men over, you have to exploit that. This never happened with Kent because he couldn't even manage a straight forward pass of 5 yards. It also isn't very threating if the outcome after skinning two players is to involuntarily kick the ball out for a throw in, but again, happy clappy.
Again though, we start playing badly (to be honest many matches we were punching and had a lot of luck anyway) and the desperation kicks in. One assist and one goal is hardly very instrumental, and despite your thoughts, would not be very beneficial to us now either.
It's a shame you missed Millwall though. Our modest attacking four ripped them apart with fluid passing football, sheer organisation, and battle. That was when we were at our best. As for P'boro, that turn around was mainly credited to JOB to which I agree, his energy and drive meant that Murphy could make a couple of runs and exploit them. It was one of his better games. Had JOB not come on however, I doubt we would have seen the same outcome. As I said anyway 'in nearly all games he hasn't scored in' and the one you picked there is the one that is of most exception. It's a shame he has not been like that more often, because he could have been a lot more instrumental to us so far, rather than a too often passenger.
