FanPost

It is time. (A rant)

I have been patient. I have recognized that he arrived still young, and that he tries hard, and that growth sometimes comes in unlikely measures and with inconstant timing. But it has been two years now, and the evidence is extremely clear. Benny needs to stop looking the other way on this.

CONOR DOYLE IS NOT A F**KING FORWARD.

  • His positioning in the open field to receive potential 50/50 balls from deep is often poor. He doesn’t give himself enough of a chance to win those balls from his marker.
  • When he gets hold of the ball in the attacking half, and the situation calls for a succeeding attacking move of some kind (dribble, pass, shot, whatever), his near-universal first instinct is to stop play. This is an awful anchor around his neck in the forward role, because it means he kills off our transition play ruthlessly. This was true when he first arrived here, and after two years of coaching and training it is just as true today.
  • When he gets hold of the ball in the attacking half, and the situation calls for a possession play, he is also ineffective. Now, in the game thread recoil argued that he does OK with this because in these situations, backpasses are what you do. I agree that backpasses are what you do, but they are not the entirety of his responsibility there. If the backpass is not married to an immediate further run to help disrupt the defense; if the backpass is technically poor or ill-timed; if the choice of target for the backpass is the wrong one… then you have a "successful" possession play that leads nowhere. Doyle is absolutely at fault for these problems, and they are a common feature of his work.
  • Since Doyle is not fast and does not have superior dribbling skills, once he stops play or gets possession facing away from goal he has no alternative but to dump the ball off. This makes his passing more predictable and easier to defend.

Played as a forward, he is a net negative to the team at all times and in all game states. It’s a small loss when protecting a secure lead, and it’s a disastrously huge problem when we are tied or behind. It is absolutely no coincidence that DCU suddenly became much more active and dangerous when Arrieta entered the game, and this despite Arrieta’s insistence on standing around consciously offside for extended periods.

Now, the thing that really has me scratching my head with Doyle is that he does seem to do one thing quite well, but we don’t get to see it very often because of where he plays. Early in the second half tonite, he made a very attractive leading pass out of his own half to spring Rolfe around the defense. He’s done this sort of thing before, multiple times that I have seen live, and the key point is that he does it when he’s not in the attacking third, and has a stable position where he is not tightly marked. I can’t see into his head to know why this is so… my guess is that he multitasks poorly, and gets distracted when he has to pass the ball while also considering who is marking him and where his next run should be. But the evidence is consistent at this point, and the fact that he has not shown any progress at all toward growing out of this limitation says to me that we should stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. He needs to be recast, as a defensive winger, as a fullback, as a homeless man’s Andrea Pirlo, something. Because he’s not a forward. Not at all.


h/t to DCU_Exile, who reminded me that FanPosts exist for this purpose. :)

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