No disrespect taken.
You’ve talked about nobody blaming a single player yet you did. Yes you can be culpable for dropped points at any age, that is very simple to understand.
However you’ve gone out of your way to single out a guy who, by your own admission in the post I’m replying to, isn’t the only one you could lay blame on for not being as close to city as we may have been.
In a thread about Paul Pogba and his impact on our season, you’ve decided to argue that Axel is why we are behind city. That’s what the original post I replied to singled out.
Like you’ve said, there are far more senior players you’d expect better of in many more moments than Axel has been involved with for it to really be the reason why we’re behind.
He didn’t cause the poor start to the season, nor our run of draws earlier this year - it’s a team effort. So to single him out and say “if he hadn’t been on the pitch at all we’d be in a title race” is ludicrous.
The truth is sometimes harsh. If we had a 6 year old in goal, we may lose as a result. It may be understandable, but it still happened. We did have a poor start, but so did the Champions elect, both for the same reason, so I excluded that.
It wasn’t about this being a Pogba thread, I chose a post about what cost us a shot at the title race to ‘blame Axel’ - which I didn’t actually do. I said that the gap is not that big that any arbitrary thing can be picked that could have changed our season. An example of one of those things is the small, but costly role Axel played in our PL season. You may prefer to give a different example, based on the fact that you want to be nice and not mention the 6 year old we had in goal, because he’s only 6 - or the undercooked centre half we’ve had, because he’s only young.
I’ve chosen this particular example because Axel has barely played, so his input is easy to isolate, so as a result, makes it easier to use as an individual example. Axel has barely featured, and his few involvements are, as a result, easier to distill down to a a negative one. Using a De Gea mistake, for example, is kore difficult, because it will need to also be offset against points he has won, and then it just becomes the natural to and fro of football. Sadly, Axel has very little positive involvement to reference, but his few minutes on the pitch can unfortunately be more easily be linked to direct lost points. It’s therefore easy to hypothetically subtract his involvement altogether and imply that we will be better off.
Indeed, you can look at some forward players who haven’t been great, but they have all played a lot of football. Therefore, that is just the team that we have had. A team with forwards who haven’t been great. It stops becoming an example of an individual thing at that point. Otherwise we’d be basically saying that ‘if we had a better team, we’d have won the league’. My example is one that has little bearing on the general strength of the team that has played this season. They are the odd instances that could have had us in the race DESPITE any feeling of our attack not being that good, defence not being that good, goalkeeper etc. We’d have been near the top with our team not really needing to be any better than it is, if not for a few unfortunate Axel contributions.