The problem with Maguire going walkabout is that is has been demonstrated over and over and over and over again that when he leaves his space, our team is not competent enough to fill in the gaps created by him. Therefore, you’d think that he can’t assume that someone will plug the gap when he creates a massive hole in the centre of defence, and for that reason he should stay in his position instead of chasing players to the corner flags and just deal with the cross once it comes in instead.
We, as a team, even when playing with actual defensive midfielders, are utterly incompetent at compensating for Maguire’s “proactive defending”, so at some point you’d think that the captain would stop leaving his position to create massive exploitable holes in our defence, yet week after week we get these situations where he leaves his position to track a man out to the wing or into midfield and something happens from that area and then it’s everyone else’s fault for not reacting to it. Just stop doing it for feck’s sake.
At some point he has to realise that him leaving his position is something that every team we play against is successfully exploiting and stop doing that in favour of chasing players into non-dangerous positions and leaving dangerous areas wide open.
If we had a competent defensive structure or intelligent defensive midfielders then it would be less of an issue, but the matter of the fact is that we don’t and somebody in our team should’ve copped on to that fact by now, because every bloody opponent has done that and uses it to great effect.
