Uruguayan central defender Sebastian Coates made his full debut against Brighton in the Carling Cup last night and faired pretty well, despite one errant ball which nearly cost the Reds a goal. So what do we learn about the 20 year old last night?
1) Good distributor of the ball – It was clearly evident from his performance last night that Sebastian Coates is a Liverpool style central defender. Despite his height and the assumption that his best quality would be his aerial ability, Coates showed his ability to distribute the ball out of the defence on many occasions, picking out midfielders with some accurate passes.
There was of course one errant pass which nearly led to Brighton scoring with Craig Noone hitting the bar with a long range effort but he will learn from that mistake, and he ensured his error wasn’t compounded by shepherding the ball out for a corner after it rattled the crossbar. He acknowledged his error to fellow team mates and kept his composure afterwards. He could well be in the Daniel Agger and Alan Hansen mould of passing out from the back, something that Dalglish and Comolli were surely attracted to when they bought him
2) Can be drawn out of the defensive line – Young defenders can be too eager to retrieve the ball when they believe they can tackle an opponent by moving out of the defensive line. It is a problem that players even costing £20m+ such as David Luiz struggle with as well, and it can lead to silly free kicks being given away as well as creating space behind you for the opposition to exploit.
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quality, composed and needs time
The commonly-held notion is that it’s too early to pass judgement on him. However, by writing this article you must accept that some people are going to have an opposite knee-jerk reaction to Coates’s performance to your own reaction. I could elaborate on the faults you’ve outlined above and suggest that he appeared a tad slow, lacked mobility, was beaten a little easily to headers by players a lot shorter than him, and then i could continue to dismiss your appraisal of his distribution as fairly optimistic given that he wasn’t asked to pass the ball under any kind of pressure at all. Indeed, the one time he did try something approaching a ‘cross-field ball’, he wildly misjudged it and gave Brighton a shot from which they nearly scored.
As I said above, it’s too early to write an article on a 20 year-old who has started playing football in another continent, and if you do insist on analysing his game, then perhaps a removal of the rose-tinted ‘He’s like Hansen’ glasses would be wise, seeing as how his game last night looked nothing like the Scot’s style.
He may be good in time, but you’d have done well to ‘learn’ anything from last night’s performance.
My god, a sensible, well thought out response and opinion …. but then if everyone thought like you, there would be a lot less football “articles” on the net (and a lot less of the more sensational, controversy seeking drivel)
“Uruguayan central defender Sebastian Coates… and faired pretty well.” David Tully, if you desire to be a decent writer someday, then you need to know the difference between “fair” and ‘fare”.
Amen, the grammar of numerous web blogs, leaves alot to be desired these days.
lets pray for this young defender to be a success and injury free…
Felderkirk has already done what he supposedly rebukes others for by jumping in to criticize the new player.You would do well to simply leave Coates alone and let him develop “au naturel “.
Ah yes Chambers, but I did it with style!
😉
Also, I don’t think I could be accused of criticising the player in any longterm capacity. I merely pointed out the folly of judging a 20 year-old’s strengths on the basis of one game, pointing out that his performance could be critiqued in an alternative manner too and it would prove nothing.
I think encouragement is vital obviously but not at the expense of impartiality and reality. It’ll take time for him to adjust – that’s clear from his 1st performance – and commenting on his apparent shortcomings in this one game is at best as arbitrary (if not more productive) than mentioning him in the same sentence as Alan Hansen.
did nobody else think he looked a little awkward? he looked like he had no co-ordination at all. running like a freak.
If you’re anything like your namesake ‘gok wan’ , then you know nothing about football sunshine
Something he absolutely has to address if is to succeed is to get into the gym and build up his upper body. He has looked a little bit out of shape and sadly we have a pretty poor recent track record of helping young players improve physically.
Whilst I really enjoy reading articles about LFC and it’s players, I do feel some of these are perhaps slightly premature.
Of course, as fans, we all look at news players with great expectation, but we need to give them atleast a season to settle in. Some will do so quicker than others. Those that are slow to progress need patience and balanced opinions.
Coates does look like he has promise, but we all know that consitency is much harder to achieve.
Iv seen players after 1 game look like a million dollars and amount to nothing and vice versa.
I watched him on the copa and he was fantastic!
He’s at a new club where every player is under pressure to deliver due to poor performances all round.
So his first game comes off the back of 2 losses, one of which was a shameful 4-0 drubbing.
Yes he looked shakey at times, which is understandable! but there was also alot good things he did and on the back of what of what I saw in the copa, we have bought 1 hell of a player and I’m sure this will be reflected with every game he plays!
Is he better then Danny Wilson,Ayala and Jack Hobbs(the next Hansen’s!) who have been given a few games to prove themselves then dissappeared!
Give him time and he will only get stronger and quicker and read the English game better.
Remember Phil Babb appearing like a top defender next to Paul Magrath in the world cup.
Well, this silly ould club has well and truly taken the bait again!! I’ve seen this guy play internationally a few times and he’s average at best!!!!