Posted April 23, 2014 09:15
· last edited April 23, 2014 09:19
Interesting discussion on Boyd not scoring enough and should be a winger, well we didn't play a system with wingers for almost all the season and Boyd was probably the best we had as a forward being able to provide width and penetration. His goal return per min of game time, as shown by PWF's table, was better than a lot of first choice HAL forwards in other teams. He assisted or scored a goal every 155min. People talk about Riera finding his feet being the catalyst for our surge, it was also Boyd who inspired us to wins against Heart and WSW in the beginning of mid season winning streak and you will probably find that Boyd was involved in a lot of our better moments during the season.
Agreed, I think that if you were to compare Boyd to a more famous player he would be similar to Thomas Muller. Both make intelligent runs and draw defenders away from other players and passing channels, but don't really fit into the traditional mold of either a winger or a striker or an attacking mid. Muller scores more but he is in a team which is dominating its opposition constantly (although I just checked and as a percentage of team goals and assists Muller is contributing about twice as much as Boyd).
This is a very long bow to draw.
Not saying Boyd is anywhere near as good as Muller, just that he's the same sort of player. Like saying that Riera is a similar type of player to Makalele or something. My point was Boyd is a player who creates space for his team by being mobile in attacking areas but doesn't fit in the more standard roles that most attacking players can be categorized into.
But I haven't given this an indepth analysis or anything, more just a passing thought about what Boyd brings to the team...