‘Young, hungry, passionate’ should all be disregarded, they are just words used to pad out a ‘list’ of qualities. Every team needs character, that is true. You shouldn’t be getting into a top side on character though. City’s players don’t lack balls and work rate and all of their midfielders are three times as good as McTominay, which is the bar we have to meet.
The character is just being highlighted because it’s the one outstanding quality. He doesn’t have more character than De Bruyne. Just that nobody keeps banging on about KdB’s attitude. He has passing and shooting we can talk about instead.
You say ‘this team needs some guts’ - I’d say that’s pretty much all we have. It’s the quality that is lacking. Ole has made sure the team is ‘brave’, ‘hungry’, ‘want to improve’, ‘young’ - our problem lies in the unfortunate fact that our footballers are not that good. Generally speaking, they are all brave lads. Beyond that, we’ve yet to see much class in the side. That will improve as the quality of footballer improves. Scott McTominay should never have been allowed to unimpress his way through his United academy career, and then just walk into the first XI at 21 and be an automatic pick week in week out. We need to have some form of higher standard than that. He should at best be made to come up under some senior top pros and understudied, not given a by into the XI as a kid, a kid that was not even an outstanding kid, on the basis that we have nobody else. Who let it get to that?
For what it’s worth, the kid has done incredibly well in terms of what can be reasonably expected of him. It’s just that there is a disparity between what is expected of him and what is expected from us.