Problem is, he has been tried everywhere. Even when he was the mythical number 10, his odd goal only served to mask his awful performances and plenty of people saw through that. He would regularly avoid responsibility, hiding between the lines, so people would then blame the supply from those behind him and movement of those in front.
For someone with his skill set, ie, shooting from distance, and supposedly linking play, he doesn't show initiative to drop deep and take control of the ball in areas he can hurt teams, he just waits. Most of his passes/touches are 1st time passes back to where they came from or the half hearted flick/back heel round the corner that fail way more often than they come off.
He doesn't dribble with the ball to draw players in, inviting pressure on himself to create space for others around him.
He's definitely not an option to pass to in a tight space, as he loses the ball a horrendous amount under even the slightest pressure.
He doesn't make clever runs off the ball.
He doesn't make intelligently timed late runs into the box to finish off moves. In fact, the majority of his admittedly spectacular goals have come from outside of the box and he has scored to my mind, 1 header (West Ham?).
He doesn't shoot nearly enough and when he does, the results range from the sublime to the ridiculous. It's bizarre, but when his efforts don't go in, they are usually insultingly tame or go nowhere the target. Sometimes, a narrowly missed shot can get the crowd up and put a team on the back foot.
His free kicks and corners are abysmal. He has yet to score a free kick for us in almost 3 years. Lucas Digne has scored several. Even Joe Williams scored 1 in the summer.
He has missed nearly as many penalties as he has scored, a disgusting waste of opportunity for a team that has struggled to score and create chances. This has the double effect of not only disheartening your own team and crowd, but also lifting the opposition.
He can't tackle to safe his life, and I've never seen a player arrive just late enough to not intercept a pass as many times as him, it makes me wonder if it's deliberate. I don't think you could try to be as close without success and be quite as bad. It may be his most consistent talent.
He started on the left or right and everyone said he'd be better in the 10 behind the attack. He got his opportunity there and proved to be almost as ineffective, until his biggest defenders started to suggest he should play deeper to be "more involved".
People slate Schneiderlin, and rightly so. I never understood why we wanted him, or why United wanted him before us, but when he signed, for those 1st 6 months, he proved me wrong, before falling off a cliff. But for all the criticism of his faults and his lack of heart, he virtually always shows for a pass or as an option, even to his own detriment.
I can say neither of those things about Sigurdsson, who I was equally baffled by our interest. He has never once proved me wrong, and even the goals he has scored, they only strengthened my opinion that all he is and has ever been is a YouTube compilation waiting to happen.
Bilyaletdinov was chased for doing pretty much the exact same thing, only he came from a different league, with a different language and culture, for 1/5th of the price, with far far FAR fewer chances to impress, and was certainly never pandered to by Moyes the way this fraud has been.
I have never wanted a player to leave so badly, and I genuinely can't wait to see the back of him.
Hopefully he can take Pickford with him.
