john68 wrote:Nobody can deny that Robbie is a World class quality player and I for one enjoy watching his silky skills. My fear is whether the way he plays fits strategically with the way the team plays.
I am drawn back to the old Rodney marsh question. At the time, he was the most creative player I had ever seen in a City shirt and like thousands of others, would drool whenever he got the ball. Some of the individual stuff he did was of a different class.
It is now commonly agreed that he was detrimental to the way the team played and he is commonly accused of being the reason we failed to win the league in '72.
Then, as now, we were a team that used speed to get from one end of the pitch to the other. Marsh held the ball up and slowed that process down.
Though not as good, Tevez, Bellers and Petrov all use speed to move the game on.
After that 1st season though, I recon Marsh along with Bell became the stars in that team in the following years. Had Book not bizzarrely dumped him when he was playing his best football ever, he may have made the difference between drawing or losing & winning key games during the League cup winning side's title challenge the following season. Like Robbie he gave people a different problem to worry about.
It could be a very similar situation with Robbie. He could perhaps make a crucial difference if/when he turns it on. Hughes knows how that can work from playing next to that French turd. He couldn't run or tackle but he made a difference.
