Fair enough, maybe. I just think KR has, whatever else you may think of him, an excellent record when it comes to bringing through youth players. Agyei is the most glaring exception, I can think of, to that general trend in the last couple of years. You can say 'play him through the middle', but he has had chances there before and failed to impress (people keep mentioning the Pompey game, but he hardly pulled up any trees there for me). This strikes me as a last-ditch effort to coax performances out of him, and if Saturday is anything to go by, it's worked a treat. He was brilliant, turned the game on its head. If KR has tried the softer touch approach you're advocating, which he may well have done, and it hasn't worked, surely this hard-line approach is justified if it's effective? Which, on Saturday's performance, it has been?
I'm not going to die on this hill and will be more than willing to concede that KR has got it wrong if that's how it turns out. It's just annoying to me that less than two weeks after going on a run of winning 11 in 12, people are using the Agyei situation to start getting the knives out for our manager again, and unhelpful, childish s**t like 'Gobbo' is starting to resurface. I think there are legitimate grounds we could be criticising him on at the minute - struggling to get the best out of a very talented attacking squad despite being well backed on deadline day, for example. I just don't think Agyei is the one.
