David Moyes has reopened the debate on Declan Rice’s weekend error in his ghost written column for the London Evening Standard.
The manager came in for some criticism of the youngster after his public remarks about him following the Arsenal game and appears to reinforce his views nearly a week on declaring: “I don’t think we can hide the fact that he should have just headed the ball away for their second goal. That’s football.
If it was any player, I would have said the same thing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 19 or 29, the message has to be the same. Of course, we understand he’s a young, developing player, but you cannot hide the facts and that was a poor decision he made.
Declan knows what he did and he’s had one or two incidents this season. To be fair, though, his form in general has been very good, he’s steadied down so we hope it is a blip and that he won’t make a similar mistake again.
The truth is there are very few 19-year-old central defenders in the Premier League — if any.
Declan’s due a renewal of his contract, but like everything else, it’s on hold until we are mathematically safe from relegation. For the sake of a couple of weeks, it’s not going to make much difference.
Sunday’s game is obviously important for us. We’re not safe yet, but even if we were, my focus would be on how far up the table we can go in these last four matches.
We always knew this would be a difficult period for us and we have to find a way of winning another couple of games.”
And if rumours are true wants to convert him to a defensive midfielder, what planet is he on or is he completely delusional. Just play him in his right position within a back four, don’t try to ram square pegs into round holes or better still walk away at the end of the season so a proper manager who recognises that teams have defence, midfield and attack in a 4-4-2 or 3-5-2 maybe away play 4-5-1 systems not in the 8-1-1 bus formation which seems to be your only tactic.
Even BFS on occasions was more adventurous.
He’s as much a midfielder as he is a defender – Westley gave CandH a piece saying that way back. That’s why he’s so valuable and why I think it was unfair of Moyes to criticise him so heavily.
Although don’t agree yet with Nononsense on Moyes and would like more time to see how that would develop, I do agree about Declan Rice, if we want a utility player thats fine but Rice has the chance to be a top class player, switching him around to lots of positions is pointless, let him master central defence, once he is an established full international for a few years maybe see what else he can do, it is short term thinking which we see a lot of at our club. Otherwise we will turn a top talent into a Joey O Brien, who is another that probably would have been a lot better if BFS hadn’t swapped him around so much.
Rice made a mistake , end of . Masuaku also for not protecting the keeper . Why is the world and his dog banging on about Rice . It’s all getting rather tiring now . We have a massively huge a important game this weekend to play .. stop all the talk .
How sensible Kevin. Move on, bored, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Get Moyes out of our club now.
He is turning into the most negative manager we have ever had and that’s counting Allardyce and Grant.
Really hope he isn’t our manager next year. He hasn’t done anything to earn it. The reversal in fact.
Go Now…