Your point? Him being a defender is no excuse to not knowing how to cross a ball. Excuse me, but me not being English maybe makes me say stupid things. In my country, we have "baby football", from 3 to 12, then youth system, and pretty much every player that reaches first division can hit a decent cross (or at least on consistent basis). This past year, most of our crosses have been at knee height or very, very past the box. Yes we had some good ones, and some fantastic ones, but the majority...Even Andy had to get on his knees to hit a ball!
Not sure what's your point either. The way you put, I would imply that the system that you have in your country is of such efficiency that everyone will be able to deliver quality crosses into the box right from the goalkeeper to the striker. But in reality, it will not be the case, Johnson is a defender and his main task is to CLEAR the dangerous crosses coming into our box, not Delivering crosses into the the opposition box. Of course, I can accept some kind of misshit, overhit or underhit crosses from Glen but to do it consistently over the duration of the game is unacceptable. So, who's fault and who will be responsible for that? More importantly who carries a greater responsibility to get it right? Will it be Glen or the coach, or both?
My opinion, both, the coach carries a greater responsibility. Glen never asked to be played in that position, the coach asked him to play as a wing back, that's what he has done and he even delivered crosses as what is expected of him, unfortunately most of the crosses were of not much use. Hence, the coach job is to tailor an effective traning programme for Glen and to improve on that. But week after week we sees the same quality of crosses from Glen. Having said that, I'm not protecting Glen, he should have realised that his crosses were getting nowhere and ineffective and should have put in extra hours to improve on that. I don't see any improvement which led me to believe, both Glen and the coach don't bother.
Let's say we get Pepe to play as a striker, can we expect Pepe to be able to strike the ball as good as Stevie or Suarez but yes I'm sure he does learn how to strike a ball in the junior league, academy to the senior league etc. How well he strikes the ball depends on whether he puts in the extra hours in training or whether there's a special programme for him. We can't expect to turn him from a world class keeper into a world class striker without special training programmes. The same goes for Glen.
By the way, I'm no English either and hope that both of us are not talking stupidly.
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