Captain wrote:
He's been at Madrid for 7 or 8 years though mate, it's not just Mourinho.
He scores plenty of goals, but his stats are buffed by hattricks and doubles against the worst teams in the league, he barely ever scores against the top 5-6 teams and his european record is shoddy for a guy who regularly gets over 20 domestically and plays for one of the best teams around.
He is undoubtedly a good player, but I don't think he is unquestionably head and shoulders the best available to us.
True he may not regularly score against the biggest teams but from what I remember he's usually either taken off early in those games or brought on off the bench. Actually that happens most of the time irrespective of if they are playing a top 5 team or not.
Also if you look closely at his performance data on transfermarkt.com you would see that in the CL he has only 3 or so goals in the competition each season but only starts like 5 games. He also regularly scores in games that finish 1-0 a lot more than high scoring games so he makes a big difference against those "small teams".
Don't forget there are another 15 teams in the league who are not too 5 and if he can be the difference against these teams we'd be much better off, especially considering he will definitely score in the big games as starter for us as the chances we create every game make sure that he won't be left without a sight of goal.
Remember before Ronaldo left to go to Madrid and even in his first few seasons at Madrid? He scored a lot of goals against the smaller teams and was being hailed all over but at the same time receiving stick because he hardly used to score against any of the big teams (except us that is and whether those critics meant to include us as one is a different question)? That went on for years and now he's scoring for fun in all the games against Barca and has no problem. Sometimes it's a confidence issue rather than anything else and being benched even when you're playing well does nothing to help and I'm sure that's one thing Wenger can give him.
