First half he did very well. His contributions get overlooked as he won us a lot of set pieces and nearly ended up scoring from one of them. The second half-exposed his weaknesses as he always tires in the second half, but that will happen if you want a player like him to run up and down the pitch for sixty minutes, running at and taking on defenders while being asked to track back and stop them as well.
I can see people's point of view as to his deficiencies yet if we had won/drawn that game yesterday it would have been from his goal and moment of magic alone.
I just don't understand why he gets singled out as there were far worse players than Bernard yesterday whose net contribution was below zero!
I also find it strange how so many of those who are hailing James as the answer also slate Bernard at every opportunity. I think they are in for a rude awakening because from what I have seen so far, James shares a lot of strengths but also weaknesses with Bernard, especially within the context of the kind of premiership game we saw yesterday.
I think both Bernard and James suffer from the lack of quality around them. I noticed yesterday Bernard played a pass to someone and made a darting run into the penalty area, but whoever got hold of it (can't remember) instead of instinctively playing this one-two sent it back out of the box again and the opportunity was gone.
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