Good post. The “Fred can’t pass” meme is becoming the 2021 version of the 2010 “Carrick only passes backwards”. Genuinely astonishing that anyone can watch all our games and come out with stuff like that.
McT is definitely an issue when it comes to passing. On good days it’s fine but those good days are rare enough. In his defence, the last good day was our most recent fixture. And he’s young enough to keep on building on that.
I think the majority of peoples football opinions traditionally have come from "I heard at the pub..." and over the past few years that has moved into "I saw on Twitter/Insta/Facebook...".
The concern with this is that at least when it was "I heard at the pub..." people still watched the games - albeit generally biased one way or another, this has now been replaced with the social media crowd who can back up what they think with a 5 second video which gets shared thousands of times and one simple mistake which previously would have been forgotten about within 10 minutes, now overshadows an entire match or even a sequence of matches.
Maguire has been a major victim of that since he joined the club and certain Fred has too, there were spells last season where he was consistently good for 5/6 matches on the bounce and yet all you'd see online was a stupid pass that went out of play and 95% of the internet would seem to think he was useless because of it.
As for McTominay, agree on his use of the ball, at times it is a concern however the overall growth in his game has far exceeded my expectations of him so I'm hopeful he can continue honing his game because he's already a much more important player for us than I ever thought he would become.