On the subject of Rajovic and toasters, watching him attempt to play football makes me want to plug one in and get in a bath with it.
Devon White 38:appearances 7 goals, Chris Ilewumo 45 appearances 4 goals ( although no one is saying he was better the Rajovic), We need Sherlock Holmes’s to work out how come Rajovic has scored so many, it’s a complete mystery!
My brain is too alcohol ravaged to make a fair comparison of the 2 of them, but this is a truly damning assessment of Rajovic. Devon White was the absolute pits.
Owners were asked to Parlaci. They parlacied. Let's wait for the whole truth to come out before we leap to pointing fingers.
In principle I entirely agree. We should be helping him find that extra agility, improve his passing and get him to hold it better. However I just don't think we'll see much improvement with his agility and pace at least is because he's done growing into his body and is not a player who is naturally or trained at a young age to be exceptionally agile to compensate for his height. I haven't seen anything in his games to suggest there's enough to build on as his games haven't demonstrated the ability to. I've seen enough to see he can do hold up play and it's mainly his strength that's letting him down and that's one of the easiest things to help train. That can be worked on and there's a sufficient baseline as he knows how to, he just needs to adapt more. He's pretty quick to react to poaching opportunities (Nobody could have anticipated Hoedt's superb ball as it came out nowhere) and I'm not sure that's easily taught as it is intuition, within reason. For me, it's a case of both being realistic and leaning into his strongest abilities. He's not agile and he's not technically great, for former is limited by his earlier development. You can make small gains if he does things like yoga but you won't see a big improvement. Technically on the ball it's similar. You can put some focussed development there and you'll see some limited gains but they'll be minor now as it's fundamental muscle memory. But he does know how to use his body but has hit a wall I think fatigue wise and adaption wise until the end of the season. This is going to be the easiest to train time wise and has the most potential to develop. I can see why VI wanted to sign him with our limited budget because as much as we and I have slated he is our top scorer and has won us a large number of points this season. He's frustrating as hell to watch when the ball trampolines off him or when he can't beat his man either in strength or dribble but 10 goals with potential for a few more before season end is no joke.
Miss read this and thought it took 8 months before you could knock one out. That would have been one hell of a day.
The difference is, then we had a team of very limited talent but bursting with identity. Gibbs and Porter are HOFers. The likes of Johnson, Hyde, Hessenthaler etc. Are still more memorable today than most/all of the passing fancies we've had through the club over the past 5 years. This side has the same talent of that side (which was assembled for pretty much nothing in terms of spend) but nobody in 30 years will be talking about TDB or Lewis.
Nah, during that purple patch he looked the real deal. Plus he was very fast. Nobody at the time was saying he was crap. We thought he was another Philips.
Crap game by the sounds of it but gets us out of our recent rut. Hopefully puts some confidence into the team. Another good finish by Yaser.
Look, it’s been evident since day 1 that we’ve bought an amateur player with a knack for scoring goals in the 6 yard box. That’s what got him up from the third tier in Denmark to the first in Sweden, and that’s what got him a move here. But he’s still someone who is playing way above his level and as such he doesn’t provide anything outside the box. In fact it’s worse than playing with 10 men because every time the ball is played to him there’s a potential for a counter attack against us. Fair play to the coaching staff for trying to coach him and get the best out of him, and fair play to the lad for trying his best (he really does), but shame on VI for trying to force him into being a focal point no. 9 and keeping him on the pitch for 90 minutes when he’s having an absolute mare.
TBF if you think he is negative you should see the WO comments! He hasn't called for the manager to go at least as an example. Someone even said Asprilla's goal was lucky and a deflected shot. Not saying there shouldn't be criticism as does sound like it was a pretty average performance. Probably not helped by having no focal point up front. I noticed on the highlights there was some good play by Sema and Asprilla out wide getting into the area but Rajovic couldn't get the ball under control when he got it. When Bayo was fit he seemed to start ahead of Rajovic so maybe in reality the former is first choice?
Dreadful game. Hoedt, Pollock and Hamer the only decent performances. TDB, Asprilla, Rajovic all particularly crap. One moment of magic from Asprilla but aside from that he was garbage. Jamal Lewis must have a clause that says he has to play. He was the worst player on the pitch yesterday, so much so that Tom Ince looked far more accomplished at left back. Horrible to watch, but a win and a clean sheet.
The quality of performance and entertainment value was from the 90’s but the result wasn’t. We didn’t win any games from 1990 to 1998.
Feast your eyes on these highlights. Three assists for Big Dev, all of which are beyond Rajovic's skillset. One chest control and a perfect through ball, another a weighted cross and finally a flick on to put someone in on goal. As I said, he wasn't a very good footballer but was kind of crudely effective at times. My best Devon White memory was him attempting an overhead kick in one game that went out for a throw... On another note, the football was pretty unsophisticated (other than Ramage who stands out as someone that could make it in the modern game) and was played on a bog, but there was something quite fun about smashing it long and seeing what happened rather than endless passing around at the back trying to work angles with players that really aren't good enough to do it.
Exactly. Devon was twice the striker Rajovic is. The fact that Rajovic defenders have to go all the way back to Devon White just proves the point. Which is that he’s the worst striker in our history, specifically picked by the current clown ‘coaching’ the side.
Because it's something that has been failed to be properly developed before doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do it now when we are perhaps better placed to be able to than the less advanced clubs he's been at before. I'm not convinced it is mainly his strength that his letting him down - often, including a few times yesterday, he'll get to the ball in front of the defender, but he's already too cumbersome to do anything with the ball when he gets it, meaning either the ball just bounces off him or he plays passes that are behind our players. Bulking up is not going to help the ball bouncing off him like a trampoline and could make him even less able to reach the ball to begin with to shield it. I'm aware pure strength one of the easiest thing to train but that doesn't mean it's what should be targeted. He already runs like he's too stiff and top heavy. In particular his shoulders seem to be locked in a fridge position. His strongest ability is evidently his goalscoring. If you start bulking him up he could just end up like a sub-par non-goalscoring "target man" forward like latter day Deeney or Keinan Davis. It's his goals that give him leeway, as you point out in your post. He needs pace and reactions to get on to the end of more chances; strength is unnecessary for that and if anything could detract from it. If you look at the top versions of the kind of striker Rajovic seems to be - a lead the line 9 whose main asset is his in the box poaching - it's players like Lewandowski and Haaland; they aren't bulky but rather a bit more rangey and dynamic. Even if you look at our aerially dominant CBs yesterday in Hoedt and Pollock, I wouldn't say their frames are particularly built, in fact they're rather gangly, but they were sharp and winning everything. If whatever the club managed to do to Pollock over the summer can be applied to Rajovic then that would be the way to go.
Rajovic is limited and was dreadful yesterday. But for all the overly dramatic posts about being amongst the worst ever, I’d still have him over the two donkeys we had last season in Araujo and Kienan Davis.
Oh this again - using perhaps the most bargain signing of the last few seasons in the Championship (made by a club where the player was already conveniently on loan the season prior) as the sole point of comparison is ridiculous cherry picking. How about also consider that he's scored the same number of goals from open play in fewer minutes than £12mil summer signing Piroe (who we've been linked with before), or £7.7mil summer signing Haji Wright (who has been discussed in the transfer thread a number of times before his move)? Both of whom are similar ages and playing at clubs higher in the table than us.
Cannot remember who said in the shout box yesterday, but due to edge-of-your seat thriller the convo got onto Gracia's first season in the PL. Think it might of been @reg_varney who said it, but they were looking for a screen shot of the PL table after we beat Spuds at the Vic and went joint top. Here it is in that case. Only reason I am putting this here is because it has a very small connection to what was happening during the bore-fest.
I disagree with this Moog - if I ever end up coaching a youth football team I will be reminding the children that they have a chance at making the step up from U7s to the Championship based off of that infamous Watford FC full back partnership Tom Dele-whatsit and James Lewis who both made football seem so extraordinarily simple (provided you were the opposing winger)
True and rajovic will be a popular quiz question: Which Watford player scored 15 goals in a season with just 16 touches?
Bulking-up Rajovic would be a big mistake. It accelerated Troy's career decline. He is most short in the speed and the control departments. It might be possible to have targeted training to (fractionally) get him running faster. But where he could really improve in speed is in thinking: He is playing in a league a good deal higher than that to which he is used and he needs game-time and targeted training to start to cope. He is not old and certainly could improve. To that end it is important to play to his strengths and potential strengths and not to things he will never be able to do. I strongly suspect that Valerian is not able to fulfil a lot of best practice because of the thinness of the capable squad numbers and various requirements from the owner, although some of his decisions do seem eccentric. Above all, Rajovic's strength is his goal tally-rate. You can analyse it all you want and down-play it as tap-ins, but it is a knack he has had wherever he has played, and I don't see anybody else doing it at Watford at the moment.
I can only talk for myself here, but the early to mid 90’s was probably my prime time of being a football / Watford fan, in the sense of the age when I could travel up to watch games, bought the season review tapes etc so yes those players are always a bit more special to me because of the nostalgia I feel. Even players that hardly played or didn’t do anything meaningful- randomly Alex Inglethorp has just come to mind! I’d imagine many 12-20 year olds will have similar feelings to players from the current era for those reasons. I loved the 90’s teams and players but on the whole they were average at best, sprinkled with the odd gem who we might get to keep for 2 seasons if we were lucky. Just a different era, and the reduction in my enthusiasm for the current players probably reflects my feelings to towards the whole sport in general rather than just our club right now.
Yeah same here. It was my peak era travelling home and away etc. However even now many of the biggest legends invited back to the club, talked about on SM etc are from that era. Of course the 80s side takes pride of place as it was our best era ever. Of the current batch, who could possibly be considered a legend in 25-30 years' time? Today's fans will have forgotten Pollock within a season after he's gone. I still don't even remember our goalkeeper's name now and he's the incumbent.
I’d agree I think it’s mostly just different eras. Players were paid a lot less, there was a bit more loyalty (Bosman ruling wasn’t until Dec 1995, so loyalty was enforced to an extent anyway) It’s a lot more about the money and reputation now for a lot of players compared to back then.
