Zlatan stay or zlatan go?

why the discussion? Ibra will never leave. Not after 1 year

dalitis8 said:

Villa is one player,Henry is another.I don't t really understand any attempted parallels...



Pep is definitely to blame...

1.He knew(or should have known) Ibra is slow.

2.He knew(or should have known) that he has consistently flopped in CL games.

3.He knew(surely)what Eto'o was capable of.

4.He should at least have a grasp of the value of 45mil euros.

It is amazing how much in denial some ppl are...Ibra simply does not equal Eto'o plus 45mil.

Hell,he has been outscored by Pedro(a rookie winger)and had Bojan enjoyed the minutes that Ibra did at CF he would also have outscored him.

Last year Eto'o scored 36 goals,Ibra 21....go figure.

Plus,he breaks our game down.

Click to expand...

Being slow was not necessarily the point, as Pep very obviously tried to change the approach with Ibra on the pitch. It were his other, positive properties that couldnt be made effective yet. Neither his vision/passing, his flair, long shotting, height and overall physics. He doesnt have space, dwells on the ball for too long, commits too many offenisve fouls and barely heads (although his assist vs Tenerifa shows that he is capable of it ...).

Letting Etoo go just wasnt any loss at all btw. For me he never was much more than an average player, good working rate, good touch and agility but he didnt offer much beyond. His dribbling was weak (thats why he was never an option for the wings), he wasnt strong in the air and his finishing plain sucked.

On another note i would actually really like to watch those 36 goals again. I dont wanna know how many tip-ins from 1 to 5 metres distance were among these. And those goals are those that Ibra are now missing. Barca changed their style in that regard, you really see much less of those 'runs behind the defense on the flank and side/back pass to the center, right in front of the goal'-moves. There has been one vs Teneriffa, when Maxwell tried to finish for himself instead of allowing Ibra one of those Etoo-typical goals. Otherwise you see much more Messi walkthroughs or just passes from the center midfield straight ahead.

In light of the almost certain arrival of Villa (fingers crossed) I'd be happy to see the back of him. In theory it was a cool idea, never a clever deal financially but it could have worked, unfortunately Ibra couldn't maintain his early season form.

With Pedro and Bojan both here and rapidly improving all the time I feel there'd be no place for him next season, especially with Iniesta back and possibly Cesc pushing him to LW. Hopefully a reasonable offer comes in for him and we can wish him well in another league.

If Villa comes, Bojan or Ibra will go IMO.

Dont want either to leave, But Bojan has to stay no matter what tbh...

staggering amounts of retardation in this thread.

props to el tren for being rational about things. although you'll notice zlatan has a lot of simple goals too. part of the reason he's not scored as many as eto'o has been down to our midfield/dani not being as creative, and of course a style change which saw a lot more play run through messi. I like what we did, tbh, the team needs to have more styles up its sleeve than just the passing maelstrom.

we've seen glimpses of what zlatan can do, of all his different skill sets, what he needs to do now is put them all together consistently. I have faith he'll be able to do this. it took him 2 years to adapt to italy, but he's older and more mature now, so I'd expect one year to be enough to adapt to spain. next season, with a proper pre-season and playing at the head of a top-line trident (love pedro, but he doesn't help zlatan at all, in fact a lot of his goals come because he draws less attention than zlatan and leo).

anyway, regarding the criticisms... well I don't wanna get into detail coz I've been over it 1000000 times with varying people... but can we please put the fucking "big match choker" bullshit to bed? the guy has scored the winner in el clasico, has scored countless crunch goals for the team during the league campaign, was the only guy to stand up and try to get the team back into it in 3 of our 4 losses (he scored in all) and of course he scored all our away goals in the EF and QF of the champions league.

he should stay. I'll explain why in the Tactics Thread sometime after the xfer window in the HD Soccermanager League comes and goes (20 May).

Well, at the moment, with Villa and the evidence that he doesn't match within the tactical scheme of Barça, I think it's better to let him go. Maybe it will be good for him and to Barça.