[SIGNED perm] Danny Rose

Russia?

 

In the ground? Whilst playing for Watford? As opposed to playing for England in Bulgaria/Montenegro?

That’s just not true.

 

At the risk of repeating myself I cannot understand how a professional athlete can be so out of condition.
Naturally I will support Danny but it doers make you sceptical when someone arrives so large.
Has he had an injury that I'm unaware of that has prevented him from keeping in shape?

 

In Leventhal's write-up the other day he did mention that Rose intends to embark on a pre-pre-season before the rest of the club comes back:



So, although it just cryptically doesn't really explain why he feels the need to do that, it seems fairly clear that he, and everyone else involved, are aware that he has turned up the size of a small minibus.

The real testament to his professionalism will be if, upon the conclusion of that pre-pre-pre-pre-season, he has lost the required weight and is back to looking like a Premier League footballer - something that Troy has not even been able to do once...

 

Maybe TD No9 should join him if we are going to be stuck with him next season, then maybe he might just gain some renewed respect from many Hornets.

 

I am sure that having done a full medical on him they are aware of exactly what shape he is actually in. More than we can be by looking at photos of him.

There is ample time for him to get into decent nick ahead of the start of the season. He is a professional athlete with nothing to do for the next month and bit other than get into shape.

None of it really matters if he pulls his finger out and gets himself back into proper shape come mid-August.

 

Is injury even a valid excuse to get to that size though? It's easy enough to reduce your calorie intake while injured to allow for the lack of exercise. Of course you won't be at peak fitness, but there is no reason to balloon up to that size apart from lack of motivation and willpower. Are those really the traits we want in a new signing?

I saw someone say he's suffered from depression and I know comfort eating is a common side effect, and I recognise it's a dreadful illness and my heart goes out to him. But football is a ruthless business, so if this is the reason for his triple chin then we shouldn't be touching him with a bargepole.

But I am prepared to give him until the first game of the season to get back into shape and until then I welcome him at WFC.

 

Yeah just the same as Deeney at the start of the last few seasons, except it has typically taken him a couple more months after the season has already started to get in to a reasonable shape for him, which is still not a particularly good shape for a supposed PL player.

 

I mean, we're all exactly as aware of what shape he's in whoever we are, because we can all see him - but yeah, apart from that, that's basically my point - as long as he does it as he's supposed to and it works, then there's no real problem.

For whatever reason, whether it's an understandable and sympathetic one or not, it doesn't speak incredibly amazingly to his professionalism that he is still an active professional footballer, and not even a shockingly old one - one who a season ago thought he was deserving of a transfer to AC Milan - and yet at this stage in his ongoing career managed to put on that much weight for no particular reason at all BUT I'm not entirely judging/writing him off before we've seen what he can do at all based solely on that.

What does concern me slightly more is the infographic Jordan Wiemer has just put up on his Twitter showing that in all defensive metrics, as well as a fair few offensive ones, Rose was not only below the average for PL full backs, but also significantly worse than Masina during the last Premier League season each of them played :

 

Deeney has spent most of the last 5 years out of shape. I am sure there are lots of players who let go a bit during the summer and come back and burn it off. I am not saying he will or he wont, I am just saying that it is pointless to complain until it actually relevant. Provided he turns up in shape for the start of the season he can have kebabs and pints every evening for all I care.

Don't think he really looks worse than Masina there to be honest - he just looks like a different profile of player - he looks sub par defensively and okay offensively. I gather from Newcastle fans he was pretty poor aside from 2-3 games but I can't pretend I watched them. I think moving to be under Steve Bruce as an attacking full back was probably a poor career move anyway.

He may well turn out to be total ***** - but I do also think we have to be realistic about the quality of back up we can bring in as a newly promoted side on a minuscule budget. I don't mind this as a bit of a gamble given we already have a reasonable player in that position in Masina. Rose is clearly a talented player who has had a rough few years (partly of his own making, partly of having a total **** as a manager and a club owner) - if he can turn it around we would have a brilliant player for nothing, if he doesn't we have a slightly ropey back up warming the bench on fairly low wages.

 

No offence, but I don't agree with this. I think the only time Deeney was wilfully out of condition was the start of the 13/14 season, Zola's second, when he came out against Granada looking like a baby whale in the pre-season friendly. Otherwise, I think the only times he could be described as being out of condition were the recent issues he had with closed season injury and recovering from surgery.

The occasions where he was criticised for being over-sized, and rightfully so, have been where he used inappropriate personal training methods, rather than him being out of condition or being fat. The most obvious time was when he had been working out with Anthony Joshua, and came back to training like a heavy weight wrestler.

I think the guy is pretty dedicated and hard working, and other than 2013/14 I think he has trained hard with good intentions, but just found that the body size he wanted was not right for the football he wanted to play.

I think with Rose, his condition at the start of the season will be a good indicator as to whether he has any passion left in his game. He's a decent player, but we have to hope that his head hasn't retired yet.

 

….Yet he did admit himself in a recent interview he’s always had massive blowouts every summer and come back out of shape, but apparently for the first time in his career he wouldn’t be doing it this season.

 

Yet Deeney himself has said every season at one point or another that he came back unfit. I’m not sure we should be affording the player excuses he won’t give himself?

 

Lots of players blow out in the summer, it doesn't mean they don't start the season in decent condition, going back to Duncan Welbourne who used to put on a couple of stones. In my opinion, by the start of the season Deeney has been in decent condition, in terms of fitness and health, where it has not been broken up by injury or pending surgery. Unfortunately though he has always seemed to want to be as big and imposing a player as he could physically be, which did not suit his style of play, and in the worst case, when he had trained with Joshua, he had to spend the first third of the season undoing the damage done by completely overdoing it. He was criticised for it at the time, and, as much as I like him as a player, I was very critical for his choice of personal training.

Just my opinion though, but I think a few people share it.

 

Coming back unfit is pretty much standard practice for the majority of players, though they do have their personal training regimes. The whole point of preseason training is to get them back in shape, so the fact he admits to not coming back in the best condition has little or nothing to do with him not being in decent condition at the start of the season.

I do not think I am making any excuses that he has not given himself. During the Josua summer, Troy was regularly tweeting showing himself working out and commenting on his determination to return in good condition, so clearly the comments he made that you mention are rather generalised.

 

This is just very demonstrably untrue - he may have become bulkier through his individual training, for sure, but he has also very clearly been of a far higher body fat percentage than should be acceptable for a professional footballer, let alone one in the Premier League, for much of the past few seasons, and it was very evident in his lack of mobility and sluggishness.

It's also Joshua's personal trainer he was working with, not Joshua - he was not undertaking the training regime of a heavyweight boxer; rather, a heavyweight eater.

 

No I don't believe it is a valid excuse.
Let's hope he sheds the pounds and is in a good state of mind.

 

Or... We sign someone younger from a lower league or from abroad?

 

Not being convinced by a new signing is not the same as wanting them to fail. I would love to be proved wrong.

 

We shall see

 

Given the two years he has had it would be odd if anyone was convinced by him, but he seems a fairly cheap, low risk gamble in a position where we already had a player who was expected to start.

We have just been promoted so there are lots of players I would like to improve on, but with the cash we seem to have, that just isn't going to happen. If resources are as tight as they are - I don't mind us taking a bit of a gamble on a free back-up left back when there are positions where the funds could be better utilised.

 

Fair opinion, which I disagree with completely, in your first para.

But your second para doesn't go against what I was saying at all. I didn't say he was being trained by Joshua, and to be fair, a training regime like the one he undertook would have entailed a huge dietary intake. Don't mean he was fat though; a point I think he proved when he took off his shirt after one match to show everyone what he'd been up to in the summer.

 

But, for a start, as ever, context is vital, and to address the usual red herring there is a difference between being 'fat' and having a far higher body fat percentage than the average footballer, or indeed one that allows him to be quick enough/not insanely slow and unable to make the runs required of a player in his position.

No one is accusing Troy of being 'fat' in a cosmic sense, but in the context of a Premier League footballer, he has been 'fat' to some degree or another for the majority of his time spent as one, and there are frankly enough quotes from him over those years essentially admitting to it to add to the very clear eye test that he has not passed at almost any of those points.

 

Again, that is a fair opinion. I still do not believe it has meant he was out of condition, nor does what you are saying make him out to have been, in fact it seems to almost make the opposite argument.

I still maintain that the only time I saw him out of condition, as opposed to being in a condition inappropriate to his playing style, was at the start of the 2013/14 season, when he did look fat.

It is though, just my opinion.

 

Troy is genuinely one of the slowest players if not the slowest in either the Premier League or the championship, he’s a number 9 that cannot break an offside trap. That has to be do so with having an unnecessary amount of muscle or/and a few percentage points more body fat than he should have as an elite athlete. If you look at how much more slight he was when he was younger it’s pretty obvious his physique is far from optimal for the job he’s needed for. We all know he likes to wrestle with defenders, but that doesn’t actually benefit anyone other than his ego and his post match spiel. This is of course all massively exacerbated after spending the summer in Miami/Dubai with his mates.

 

I think Troy has looked in pretty awful condition since the Mazzari season with the exception if the Javi season and we have had to build the team in a way where we try to accommodate all his glaring weaknesses.

In the same way players like Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic have prolonged their careers into their late 30s with their professionalism, Troy was playing like a mid 30s striker by the time he was 29.

 

He never recovered from that stupid period where he decided that lifting weights with AJ was the best way to get fit for a 38 x 90 mins football season.

 

I'm not sure he will even get fit enough to become our first choice left back.

 

And so another player who was previously on loan at the club prior to the Pozzos arrival signs permanently, to join Foster, Cathcart & Clevs.

Bellerin next? There can't be many pre-Pozzo loanees still playing at a decent level that we haven't already got.

 

Absolutely, indeed, as are most things we all bang on about here, of course.

I would enter this photo, from 2018, as some further evidence, though:

 

So who ARE you suggesting we sign?