Quote Originally Posted by Woodypie View Post
I agree, Moneyball is nothing to do with tippy tappy. My last thread determined that Moneyball is pointless because our lowly position means that we can't compete with superior teams to attract possible Premier/Championship team rejects with potential, we can't attract EU players and there is no data about players in divisions lower than us. Plus, our lowly status makes our academy a waste of time because any good player we may develop is siphoned off to Premier League academies anyway. And nobody apart from Brentford and Swansea, in the Championship, have been able to make Moneyball a reality. This thread is about tippy tappy, and whether this is a practical way forward in League 5 or is it just the owners' ideological bent that is unproven and nothing more than an experiment.

I don't think your Moneyball thread proved anything besides a lot of people not understanding what moneyball is, yourself included. It's more about picking players up like Kyle Wootton who to many people didn't inspire any confidence at all when you looked at his record but look how he's turned out...

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On style of play though, it's irrelevant whether we play like Barcelona or Stoke if we fail to do simple things like see out results with a bit of game management/leadership and defend set peices. Both of the latter you'd say were not helped by us missing 3 senior defenders (including Slocombe).

Playing the way we try to gives us an edge over all the other teams just trying to boot it and try and win second balls and it into the box as soon as possible, a lot of these teams have been doing that for years and have been defending against it for years, the last thing a lot of these big lump defenders want is to be stretched all over the pitch and that's shown a few times this season when opposition players have had their hands on their knees knackered at half time.

There's a reason we looked comfortable in the games we threw away recently until late on, it's because we were outplaying them, the problem is more mental than anything, added on with inexperienced players having to step up to fill the roles of experienced leaders.