To be fair, its hard for him to flourish in the Ricky set up. Weemac that is
Exactly. McGlinchey is easily as good, if not better, than many of the creative midfield options I've seen in the Socceroos squad over the last 5 years. But all the skills that make him such a potentially good international player are not prized in Ricki's defensive, non-creative gameplan. He can't defend to save his life and doesn't have much scope to play his natural game when the ball is flying over the top of him.
Hmm, I said I wasn't going to go there, but why not. I get the impression that the opinion of McGlinchey on this forum is inflated quite a bit because we see him mostly playing in the A-league, where he's a very good player. But like I said, A-league is a long way from a good international standard.
Admittedly McGlinchey isn't comfortable in the deeper position he plays for the All Whites, which is the by-product of Ricki trying to turn him into a new Simon Elliott. That clearly hasn't worked, but is hardly the biggest problem McGlinchey faces at this level of the game.
His main issue is a technical one - his ability to control the ball and pass is compromised at this level. He takes too long to control the ball and make his decisions at the same time, which at the highest levels of the game you have to do, otherwise your options get closed down very easily. There were very good examples of this in the game this morning - in the first half, he was invariably either caught in possession, or misplaced the pass because he took too much time to get the ball under control and then make his decision. If you can't do that simultaneously, or at least very close to that, you'll struggle, and he does. His other issue is that he can't live on the ball enough when under pressure to buy himself enough time to make a decision in those type of games (he tried this a couple of times this morning, invariably lost the ball). His passing became better in the second half, as did James' when he came on (although the big difference was that James was able to live on the ball more comfortably), primarily because Mexico dropped their backline much deeper to avoid being caught on the break, which left wider spaces in the midfield areas, and consequently our midfielders weren't pressed as high up the field as they were in the first half. This allowed us to knock it around 35-40 meters away from their goal, although the pressure was ramped up anytime we tried to get closer to their goal than that. Even so, McGlinchey was only completing passes when he himself was under no pressure, and to players who themselves were under no pressure. Now, that's fine - it's better to complete these passes than not - but to be honest, a fair few people on this forum can do that. To be an international quality player you need much more than that, and he hasn't shown it at that level. Not this morning, and not on previous occasions he's played for the All Whites.
I don't want this to sound like I'm bagging him - I guess I'm just using it as an example where our fan base overestimates the ability of a player, and then goes all angsty when things don't turn out well for us because of unrealistic expectations.
Considering that a fairly high percentage of All Whites games McGlinchey has played in have been of a standard probably somewhat less than the A League level I'm not so sure this is true. You're right, at the end of the day you can't blame the coach if he's not controlling or protecting the ball as he should, but clearly an experienced former Socceroo coach has been able to tap McG's strengths and get the best out of him in his set up where ball control, passing and movement are all paramount.
I'm afraid passing and movement are not features of Ricki's style and never will be. It might be that McG has simply reached a ceiling of ability beyond which he wont go, or it could be that he is simply not being utilised in the best way. It's frustrating seeing him underperform for the AWs because you feel that with the right direction and licence to do what he does best he could be a very good international player.
