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The Question Is Why Didn’t Sammy Ameobi Replace Hatem Ben Arfa?

11 years ago
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So then, why didn’t Sammy Ameobi come on for Hatem Ben Arfa yesterday?

I’m being serious here, it isn’t a joke.

Ben Arfa was absolutely terrible yesterday, arguably one of the worst performances I have seen in a long long time.

I totally love him of course but even when you’re in love you have to tell the the truth, at least some of the time anyway.

(To feature like Dean, send in your letters/articles for the magazine/website to contribute@themag.co.uk – write about anything NUFC related – past, present or future )

I don’t blame the player, I don’t think for one second Hatem went on that pitch and thought, ‘you know what, I’m going to have a day off today’.

Sadly, some knackers in the crowd were shouting ‘come on Messi’ and ‘howay Ball d’Or’ in the second half as United and particularly Ben Arfa struggled, references to Hatem’s much publicised interview this week where he talked of his dreams to one day be up alongside Messi as World/European footballer of the year.

Yes Ben Arfa was having a stinker but when he has single-handedly put at least 5 or 6 of our 7 points on the board he surely deserves to be cut some slack.

With each touch Hatem had of the ball getting worse and worse, his touch abysmal and attempts at taking on the (replacement) left-back feeble, the only course was surely to put him out of his misery and let him withdraw to fight another day?

Of course Ben Arfa didn’t leave the stage and it did nobody any favours. This only underlines that with the bench so weak, there was no way that Pardew was going to put on the hopeless (in my opinion) Sammy instead of our imperfect French genius.

So with no replacement of any use available, instead we were left with a bizarre late substitution of Tiote for Debuchy, with Anita dropping in at right-back. Debuchy had been poor but what was the point of this on 86 minutes?

It isn’t just injuries that affect your best players, if they are having an off day or run out of form you have to have a plan B.

This was a major factor last season and already it is massively impacting with Papiss Cisse playing because there is no obvious sensible alternative. He’s getting worse with each match, not playing himself into form!

As most sensible people realised in the summer, we have a number of decent players who needed reinforced in the transfer window. We all saw what happened last year so why was no insurance taken out to prevent the very real chance of it happening all over again?

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