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The spine of the team

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New to Vital Pompey jim4pompey tries his hand at an article, looking at what sort of basis we could build a spine around – most teams have a nucleus, but what is ours.

I’m not sure about fleshing this article out and my knowledge of footie is well below many of the people on here… but here goes.

Basically it’s the spine of the team. A lot of pundits have said to have a successful premiership side you have to have an English, or British, spine to the team – to engender work ethic (run around like a headless chicken and kick people in my experience). Now looking at some of the key teams they do tend to lean to one nationality or another as the so called “spine”.

Man U with Rio, Scholes, Giggs, Carrick, Hargreaves and Rooney (okay so that does dampen my running around and kicking people comment – but it’s the exception that proves the rule).

Then Liverpool are on the up with a large Spanish or Spanish speaking contingent – you could go as far as to say Rafa deliberately destroyed the Scouse spine of the team when he took over (breaking up Owen, Murphy, Carragher and I cant remember if Fowler was there at the time).

Arsenal – when at their most potent it was French… Vieira, Pires, Henry, that one with the girlie haircut (though he ran around a lot kicking people so may be not just the English).

Now for Pompey what does this mean? Well we’re a bit of a hodge podge. Under good old ‘Arry (I don’t hate him for leaving or for nicking Crouchie – I hate him for walking out on the morning of a game that unsettled us so much it took best part of 4 months to sort it out) – it was basically African with Utaka, Kanu, Diop, Muntari, et al – and it was generally said big and athletic.

But what now? French CB pairing, Scandinavian left, no right back, not sure where Krancjar fits in (so lets say left mid for now) but Croatian, CM all British except African Diop, no right mid and then Kanu and Utaka (African) and Nugent, British, up front.

Now it seems to me we need cohesion and quick integration of what will be a new squad but who and what shall we build it around. So far I’ve seen no pattern in linked players (except quite a few are from France/French football I suppose). There’s no pattern to the type of football they play – certainly not the “lets make em big and fast” like Arry liked. More than anything this is worrying. Even if we’re on a path of getting what we can afford, it would be nice at least to see a sensible balance and pattern to it.

I’m afraid it’s not the most coherent first stab at an article but may be you get the idea and can turn it into something that sounds like whoever wrote it knew what they were talking about!

Written by jim4pompey.

The views within this article are the views of the individual who wrote and submitted this piece, sometimes solely theirs. They are not necessarily shared by the Vital Pompey Site Journalists.

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