Craven Cottage Newsround

Another quiet day for football, unless Chelsea and Barcelona floats your boat. Actually, it should float my boat, but I’m getting a bit overkilled on all this football (yea, really) and a break must be taken. And anyway, I want to watch an Italian team.

Others are writing though. Nick the Swede has a thoughtful piece on the increasingly maligned Liam Rosenior. I agree with Nick… but… there’s something not quite there with the young right-back. Nick points out that Rosenior completes the same number of passes as anyone else, which is fair enough, but still something doesn’t quite add up. It could be that Rosenior is more inclined to producing Disaster Passes, passes that are so bad that everyone watching frowns, scratches their chin, and wonders aloud “did a professional footballer really do that?” It could also be that this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: we now think “Rosenior can’t pass”, and as soon as he misplaces one we all say to ourselves “see, there it is again, Rosenior and his poor distribution”.

I suspect that the truth is buried somewhere in the above, but remain unconvinced that he’s anything other than a reasonably effective right-back who might look a better player than he really is at the moment. Full-back is a position associated with reliability and efficiency, and Liam’s not there yet (note ‘yet’: he clearly has bags of potential). However, I am frequently wrong about these things and would be delighted to see him take his game to the next level.