20 - Sergi Roberto

DonAndres

DonAndres

Wild Man of Borneo
From what we've seen of Roberto at RB, his deliveries seem pretty accurate and consistent. Much moreso than Alves in recent years. Alves' best attacking qualities were his linkup and his uncanny ability to always provide the perfect width on our flank. Alves was extremely crucial in stretching out narrow defenses, something I think we could struggle with this year without him and with Messi playing more centrally than wide. The problem was when teams who parked the bus wouldn't care about Alves' width and he'd reward them with numerous lofted and easy to defend crosses (like both Malaga games in 14/15)

Roberto is more conservative in his forward runs and he's pretty good at linking up but Messi doesn't offer him much of a RW option anymore so sometimes he's just forced to pass back to Pique.
 
serghei

serghei

Senior Member
Stric said:
Also, you can't take statements out of their context. For a while there, Tello was indeed better than Alexis, because Tello was scoring well, and Alexis was going through the worst few months of his career. He was downright embarrassing. But you can't apply those statements to entire careers.
Click to expand...

There is a difference between Tello playing better than Alexis during a point in the season, and Tello being a better player than Alexis. The same way there is a difference between Alves executing some bad crosses several months, due to a period of bad form, and him being a bad crosser per se.

Alves is probably the fullback with one the best crosses in the game. That doesn't mean that while off form he can't be really bad at them. You can form the wrong opinion about a player if you insist too much on what you see when he's off form.

This is something that happens very often here, people remember the poor performances of a player when off form and make it sound like that is his normal level. What's key in judging a player for me, is to know when he's playing poor, but under his usual level, and when he's playing poor because that is his level. If people would've watched Alexis while he was player of the year in Serie A at Udinese, they would've known he was at least a class above Tello, but he was having a hard time that season.
 
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anguy

New member
Alves aerial crosses were really horrible and one he was of the worst, not best fullback crossers! His strenghts lied elsewhere - speed, passing on ground, linkup with Messi and co., agility, ball control and stamina! Roberto has better crosses already now after few games as RB!
 
Topolino

Topolino

Gemusesuppe
The YT function has been f-ing around for weeks. But grandpa @Bojan is too lazy to fix it.
[MENTION=19793]Jombi[/MENTION] , you can maybe put a "click here" and insert the link there.
 
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