I'm not surprised that we only have Gerrard that can make a killer pass. When Allen was at Swansea all he did was pass sideways and backwards. I really don't see what Brendan saw in him to warrant paying £15m. I don't think Henderson is well renowned for being a great passer and most solid defensive midfielders like Lucas, Mascherano, De Jong etc aren't known to be good attacking passers either.
To start with I'm not sure what's Allen's role all about. Does BR expects Allen to dictate the pace of the game, DEFEND, break up an attack and start an ATTACK from midfield ala Alonso or Souness? If that's the case, BR may have got it wrong at the moment, Allen simply doesn't posses that kind of quality at the moment. The most probable reason I can find why he's in the first 11 most of the time is most probably BR wants Allen to learn from Stevie and hopefully one day take over from Stevie but there're too much rough edges that needs smoothening.
Let's start with DEFENDING and take a look at Allen's positioning, he gave the scums an ocean of space to operate and he got over ran and out muscled most of the time and players just went pass him as if he was invincible, not only in this game against the scums but many other games before this. In this aspect, Lucas is way ahead of Allen, in terms of clever positioning and closing down opposing players, it's just that Lucas doesn't possses the pace of Masch, otherwise he'll be awesome. On most occassions, I do notice when we're defending, we can draw a radius of say 5 metres from where Allen stood and we can hardly find an opposition player, however, when an opposing players moves into this circle Allen couldn't do anything effective as he's too far from the attacking player and the player and/or the ball just went pass him and he ended up that one or two yards short and chasing shadows most of the time. On occassions when he did get near to an oppostion player, he got out muscled. However, I'm not suggesting that things won't improve for Allen, but by better positioning himself, reading the game better and put in those early tackles and cover those dangerous spaces is something not difficult to achieve as he's a faster version of Lucas. That's Allen as a DM for me.
As an AM, I can't remember a single occassion where he made a useful contribution to the forward line, it could have slipped my mind. What I've seen so far when he got the ball moving forward it's always the side and back passes most of the time and that's not the way to operate as an AM. Ok, Shelvey clumsy as he may be but I could remember more killer passes coming from Shelvey than Allen. Has it got to do with lack of quality or confidence to execute a killer pass on the part of Allen?
Allen's strong point is his continuous running, but he must make those runnning count, otherwise, he'll be another headless chicken.
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