Its true isn't it but then every so often he will have a game

where he looks world class and you can;t contemplate dropping him because you just think there is a potentially complete midfielder in there.

I remember back earlier in the season i spent quite a long time trawling through stats for the purposes of a spat I was having on here with some posters about why Tettey should not be dropped. i expected to find that Johnson's presence in the midfield led to a statistically worse performance but actually what it showed was that the worst results came when both Johnson and Howson were in the midfield together so it was not necessarily Johnson who was the issue. I seem to recall in the premiership we had a similar situation where Howson came back from an injury and was put back into the team and our results declined.

I think this season there is more to it in the sense we also abandoned the 4-2-3-1 for 4-4-2 to accommodate both Jerome and Grabban but our bad run started with that Charlton defeat and they only looked vaguely threatening in the last 15 minutes after Tettey went off for Howson. Up to that point in the season Johnson and Tettey were both playing extremely well as the 2 holding midfielders and neither deserved to be dropped for Howson, however good a player he may be.

Posted By: Jim, Jan 2, 16:18:47