MikeKing
Full Member
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2017
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- Bournemouth
Do you mean the sort of hole that you get from constantly having to change between Rojo, Jones, Bailly and Lindelof as your partner? The same sort of holes you'll still find watching United right now with those guys still here, but weirdly enough not that many holes to find in that Roma defence at the moment.Maguire is not a super human, he's a top defender. He cannot play for the entire team. We certainly over-payed for him, and he's not #1 defender in the world, but we payed what we had to because we are in shite position. We are lucky to have him and let's stop pointing finger at him. Maguire is certainly not our main problem.
And no - Smalling is not even close to Maguire. That is factually incorrect. Every time Smalling played we had a hole in our defense. Maguire is 100x better.
As players there isn't much between Smalling and Maguire, I rate them quite similarly but Smalling is quicker, better 1vs1 and Maguire has the simple edge of playing great passes at times. Defensively from an individual point of view I'd rate Smalling as better, but jury is still out on Maguire's ability to lead the defence at a top club. He has not proved it yet. I think a partnership consisting of the two would be amazingly balanced, and I would expect good consistency from that partnership as well because of that.