Borini - oh dear, disappointing, federer may be right
You see, I am not hypocritical; he scored a couple of goals in the u21 Euros, and some people were saying "oh my god, he's going to have a world beater season now!!!" as if scoring a couple of goals against u21 sides means anything. On the same side, a game against PNE doesn't mean anything, so I am not going to say it means he'll continue to be poor. We don't pay him to score against children from Spain/Norway/etc, nor do we pay him to score against PNE, so I won't go overboard on either his successes or failures against those teams.
One interesting thing about yesterday's game, though: how is it possible that Sterling, an 18 year-old winger, when one-on-one with a keeper rushing at him, can calmly take a step around said keeper, and place it in the net, and Borini, 22, a striker by position, doesn't know how to do that?
If anything, that is the worrying thing.
If I go into the Borini thread, I will set the over/under on the word "brilliant movement" at 20 per page. And yet, as I watched Aspas yesterday, his movement was also brilliant. The difference is, when he gets the ball *after* moving brilliantly, it appears he has options for what to do with it, even in tight spaces. Borini doesn't really. As I have said many times: brilliant movement is pointless if defenders learn that you can't do anything with the ball even if you do move into a good position. So, ok Borini, here, you can't run very quickly, you don't have creativity like Sterling/Suarez etc, so, ok, we're going to put the ball in front of you, just the keeper to beat, just do that, just score one-on-one with the keeper, can you do that? hell, at least get it on target.
Well...
