After a late Nazariy Rusyn goal rescued a point at the Riverside, I would like to hope the striker issue has been solved, but an issue that really needs looking into is the midfield and if left as it is, could it be costly to our season?
The midfield three has been a consistent three of Jobe Bellingham, Dan Neil and Pierre Ekwah, with that largely down to the lack of other options available. For me, this just is not working. All three are far too prone to avoidable mistakes and it is going to start costing us. We are fortunate at the minute that our back four is performing relatively well as I feel they are really covering for our midfield’s sloppiness.
Jobe, I think can get the benefit of the doubt that he is clearly tiring and maybe suffering a similar fate to Callum Doyle in the 21/22 season in that he has simply been run into the ground. He clearly needs a break and hopefully Callum Styles can offer us the opportunity to do that. I actually think Jobe was the best of the three on Sunday, definitely at the back end of the 1st half, he was involved in numerous attacking phases.
Pierre Ekwah is a frustrating one, one week he is great, for example against Stoke, the next week he is playing a 5-yard pass to a Middlesbrough player warming up on the sidelines. He at the moment takes a bit too long on the ball and I think this can go for all of them in the fact they are way too pedestrian at times.
Dan Neil is a player that really needs to step his game up for me. He is way too sloppy for somebody who is now in his 3rd full season of regular football. How many times he loses the ball in bad areas or passes the ball to the opposition is becoming far too often for someone playing in the role he is. I see people blaming the fact he is playing a deeper role to what he would like, which is an area we should have looked to fill in January, but I think that excuse can only cover so much, not being able to make a 5-yard pass is not down to the fact he is playing deeper.
My issue overall is that at the minute our midfield issues seem to be scapegoated into Jobe, with many calling him out for poor performances on Twitter, but the other two are certainly not pulling their weight either.
The best sides in this league have solid midfields, with Leicester having the likes of Harry Winks and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall able to withstand teams pressing at them, while at times on Sunday Middlesborough breezed through our midfield with ease and it seems as if teams transition from defence to attack way too easily.
We are blatantly missing a Corry Evans style holding midfielder, no doubt about that, and you now feel the plan is to ride it out and hope that firstly, Styles can come in and do a job and secondly, we hope Evans comes back capable of playing to the standard he set previously which is very risky considering the scale of the injury he suffered.
To wrap this all up, I think we have the makings of a great side, looking good defensively, got good depth in quality out wide and now have a striker scoring goals, we now need to sort this midfield out to complete the puzzle and hopefully Beale is working on how to do that.
