I agree with the idea that we are light in midfield. That department in our team is a combination of very good players that are injured way too often (Thiago and Keita come to mind) with others who are good, but not good enough to carry that midfield on their own (Hendo and Milner come to mind), and finally some young lads who can't be expected to save us (Elliott, Jones, and Fabio all come to mind). Fabinho is a weird one because on his day he is top 3 CDMs in the world, but he has been super inconsistent for the past year or so and it seems to be a continuing trend.
A while back, in the ''scouting talk'' thread, I argued with someone (can't remember who) about our lack of action for a midfielder and that person made a very good point about the whole ''Jude is our target for next summer''. That person's point was that if Jude was our target then why did we try to go for Tchouameni at the beginning of the window. Quite simply, we need more than one midfielder in order to bolster that department. Arguably, we don't need two midfielders right now, but we need at least one. I personally think we were planning on offloading Ox, but his injury prevented the completion of any move. However, I have to wonder, why not bite the bullet for one season and get an extra body in midfield even if we are not capable of offloading a player from that dept? That player would obviously have to be someone we scouted and that is on our list of targets and not just some player people started barking about on Twitter. Yes, the wage bill will be inflated and you won't be able to offset the transfer fee with the money you receive from selling Ox, but the truth is that we have big creativity problems whenever Thiago is not on the pitch. Sure Keita offers something in that area, but the truth is that he is as injury prone as Thiago (if not more). I hope something is done before the window shuts, but I wouldn't hold my breath. With that said, I think the idea of banking on Elliott and Carvalho to slowly become more and more integral in our midfield and slowly offer us more and more creativity as the season goes by is not stupid either. We were 14 points behind in January last season so there's definitely time to integrate players into the team and see their contribution significantly increase as the months go by.
I also have to ask a question about the injuries. Last year Keita and especially Matip showed an incredible improvement when it comes to their fitness. I thought we finally found the correct recipe with those two (wont say ''magic'' because its nothing that will stop a c**t like Pogba from sending Keita back to the physio's room with a studs up challenge). Anybody has some insight into why all of a sudden we have 10 injuries creep up on us before the season had even started? Is something happening in the medical department?
With that said, I think that there is also a very big overreaction and there's 0 surprise about it. Whenever we get a couple of disappointing results in a row there is always a large chunk of the fanbase that comes out of the woodwork to say some of the most bleak stuff you can read and it was only going to be worse this time around when its the two first games of the season and twitter had been barking all summer about the midfield. We literally have about 10 injuries or so. Yes quite a few of those are in midfield, but you also have a ton of them in other departments like Jota, Bobby, Konate, Matip. No tittle run or season is completely derailed in the space of two or three game. It's a storm and we'll get through it.
First things first in situations like those is you need to focus on making your defense airtight. This is the base of our strength and the strength of any team who wins anything. You're having problems scoring goals, you've got creativity issues, etc. Solution? Make sure you don't concede anything every game in order to give a chance to our forwards to win us the game with one goal or two at most. This is something we didn't see against Fulham and Palace. On both occasions, one goal should've been sufficient to win the game. Bottom line is that beside the whole drama surrounding our midfield and the injuries is that we need to tighten up defensively in order to give ourselves a chance to navigate that rocky period while we wait for our injured to come back.
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