Is there such thing as a bad player?

[Maxwell]

70% mental strength 30% physical attributes.

 

[BlueLlama]

Of course there are bad players. Some get brought in by managers with crap judgement, others retained by promoted clubs or players from the youth system who blatently arent good enough but are squad fillers or played due to bad injuries etc.

 

[Ashtonian]

You name players as bad but if they were in the championship or perhaps the top league in another country would they shine there?

Mataya Kezman (or most strikers from there) in the dutch league had one of the best goal scoring records i have seen away from messi and ronaldo. it was almost a goal a game for over 100 games. Chelsea sign him and he looks like an average striker. Does that make him a bad striker? He was fantastic in another league, and by the general defenition he was therefore a good player until he moved clubs.

but this is the point i am trying to make, a player does his job well, he is a good player. If he struggles he is a bad player in people's minds. Yet the same players can do both at consistent parts of their career and it is the choice (or lack of) that has changed, not their ability.

 

[technojoe]

Is there such thing as a bad footballer? This question has had me thinking, reading all the rumours and being excited or otherwise about some of the players we are linked with. Go over to the silly season thread and you can see the type of reaction players like Kenwin Jones creates when our club is mentioned alongside him. But are these players actually bad or are they simply in the wrong team?

I have a belief that any player who can make it at the top levels of football has the ability to be a great player, great in the sense of an important part of the team, rather than award winning. Same as kids who get their careers decided by the age of 18, their clubs tell them they aren’t good enough and they suddenly face an impossible task of getting into football again. Sometimes the club gets it wrong and we see players jump up divisions with the back story of how they were rejected at such a young age. Looking at the league and seeing who we all think are good enough to play for us, is there any definitive way of knowing If they will make a good impact here? The same goes for what we consider professionals.

My best example is Lee Carsley, an average midfielder who for all intents and purposes went from club to club not really doing much. If he hadn’t have signed for Everton, how many people would even still remember him these days? When we brought him in, we had no real idea of where to play him; he was just another midfielder that was cheap. However Moyes gave him one job to do and in my opinion he was as good as anyone in that position, world included. The point I am trying to make is he came to the right club with the right manager and he was turned from an average forgettable footballer into a great one in our eyes, and nothing had changed in terms of his ability.

Going back to the point I am trying to make, when we look around teams and players, are some players just not good enough or are they at the wrong club, or under the wrong manager? A winger that has no end product is seen as a bad player, yet in our manager’s history he has taken a player like that and turned them into a fantastic central midfielder. This is a case of the right manager coming in to the club and after that the player in question suddenly starting winning plaudits every week. He became one of the top players in his division and then the one above as well yet nothing had changed about him, he just was told to do a different job. Even our own captain was signed as a midfielder by Moyes. He was a utility player and tended to play in midfield yet he was absolutely terrible in our team. You would have thought if we sold him that year that he was one of Moyes’s worst signings, yet a bit of luck being moved into defence has created an England international defender who has become the first name on the team sheet every week.

It is easy to say judge a player on what we normally see but perhaps we should all start looking at what they can do for us. Rather than base them on how they play for Stoke, or Sunderland or Bolton even, we should judge them on what they do at Everton. Not all of our signings are going to be fantastic but as we have been proven wrong about, sometimes the most unexciting players we sign become some of our favourites. How many of us (me included) would be bothered about a young right back from Sligo? Or an unwanted and boring midfielder from United? Or even an aging striker with his best days behind him, earning retirement money in Turkey? Perhaps the problem with football today is not the quality of the player, but the player making the wrong choices. Believe in our transfers, perhaps even the worst of them are world beaters in disguise.

Sometimes yes but other times no.

 

[TheCount]

Perhaps the problem with football today is not the quality of the player, but the player making the wrong choices. Believe in our transfers, perhaps even the worst of them are world beaters in disguise.

Do one Bill, if we sign Kenwyn/No one I'm finished.

 

[BlueLlama]

Current players can only be judged on their form in their current league. Sometimes you need to look in hindsight to see that one move did not work out for whatever reason (team tactics, different country/league) and that the playere was overall a good one.

Someone who makes a professional career must have some merits but looking at the Premier League there are a number f players who you just can not believe are judged suitable to be playing at that level

 

[JCW]

There is such a thing as a bad player. I give you Brett Abel, Rod Belfitt, Mick Ferguson

 

[ah11984]

Ali Dia.

 

[bluelife]

Relatively bad yes, even the worst of premier league players would absolutely outclass us on a pitch though.
But yes there are plenty of relatively rubbish players in the league.

 

[ijjysmith]

Depends what context you put it in really.

Brett Angell was a terrible player for Everton. But I bet he was better than anyone who has ever posted on GOT ever.

Apart from Conor McAleny and Azzuri

 

[Shaun4658]

Relatively speaking, yes, of course there is.

 

[bicycleheader]

The environment a player finds themselves in does have a big impact on their performances, whether that's the team they're in, the tactics they play, the backroom setup and so on. For that reason I'm inclined to think that we often get more out of players than other clubs.

Whether that's enough to make anything out of someone like Kenwyne Jones though I don't know.

I'm a firm believer in this in general, and that this what works very well for us. Its why I dont stress so much with some of the players we get linked with.

 

[blue4eva77]

Remember that lad who somehow got a game for Southampton ( i think ) under Souness

 

[TheBlueGibbon]

There's also those players who genuinely couldn't play football and spent their entire careers 'injured', there's a thread in world football somewhere about them.

 

[NickK66]

Per Kroldrup

Totally disagree. Krodrup's touch and top-class career record belie writing him off. The intensity of the aerial challenges in our league is what did for him. He was like a rabbit in the headlights at Villa. But I was mesmerised by his pre-season appearances, where he waltzed out of defence with the ball, like a lanky Beckenbauer even scoring the first goal with a cheeky chip in a mullering of an Austrian team (James Vaughan also getting a hat-trick there, IIRC). Kroldrup could play...