We started pretty well this season, but things have started looking a bit flat and we’ve stopped scoring.
It’s hard to work out exactly what’s gone wrong, but my guess is that the balance of the side is a bit off, particularly in midfield. The fans have been moaning about the formation, but 442 vs 451 vs 433 isn’t the problem.
The problem is that playing Dani Parejo (on loan from Real Madrid!!) as a deep-sitting playmaker was asking too much from him, but dropping him is equally stupid. We need players of his quality on the pitch, but we can’t expect them to do everything.
I’d put Parejo back up front, dropped off behind one striker, as he played earlier in the season. We can rotate him and Buszaky in this role (and Vine, when he’s back). I’d also make the striker Agyemang or Balanta, and not Blackstock. Balanta was excellent in the early games, and I don’t understand why he’s not featuring. Blackstock may be popular, but I don’t believe he ever makes goals for us. He pops up to tap/head the ball into the net, which is obviously a valuable quality in a striker, but he is way too passive most of the time, and I don’t believe that any of our other strikers would get any less tap ins.
I also think that dropping Ledesma is ridiculous. We can’t expect him to be on fire every game, but his delivery, especially from corners and free kicks, is infinitely better than any other options we’ve got, and he makes things happen.
Rowlands is truly awful on the right, and if we have to find a way to lever him into the team each week (I’m not convinced that we do), that is not the solution. I think Rowlands is decent as a more defensive midfielder, but if Dowie feels he needs two out-and-out defensive midfielders, then I’d rather see Rowlands play on the left instead of Cook from time to time. He played well there a few seasons ago, and although his left-footed crossing is poor, he would cut in and unleash some great right footed shots which got us a few goals. And Cook is still a shadow of the player he was a couple of years ago - I don’t think it would do him any harm to be rotated or come on from the bench from time to time.
Last week, Richard Wright, the keyboard player with Pink Floyd, died.
Maybe I’ve missed it, but I’ve heard surprisingly little in the mainstream media, which is a travesty.
He always came across as a quiet, private and modest person, but he was a key part of a great band - and will be sadly missed by many, many people.
Tom Smith really doesn’t seem to be having much joy with his iPhone.
I, on the other hand, love mine (despite the occasional glitch, random departure of what appeared to be a fully charged battery, or stupid loss of preferences when upgrading).
This may be something to do with the fact that Tom seems to have about 100 third-party apps installed on his, and I (remembering the days of OS 9 extension madness all too well) have about 10 on mine.
I suspect though that it’s all about expectations and the managing thereof.
I can’t speak for Tom, but all I really wanted from my iPhone was something that replaced my old iPod and phone, and by the way was a better internet device than my previous Sony Ericsson not-at-all-smart phone. Expectations well and truly met.
Throw in the fact that I’ve now got always-on, eat-as-much-as-you-can data access wherever I am (yes, at super slow 2G speeds - so what? How fast can you read RSS feeds anyway?), and I am a happy bunny.
Apart from the bloody recessed headphone socket of course, which is right pain in the arse.
For what it’s worth, my list of apps, in rough order of usage:
- NetNewsWire (news)
- Things (to do)
- iFooty (footy news)
- TubeStatus (travel news)
- Remote (kewl)
- Palringo (chat)
- LastFM (music)
- OmniTuner (making music)
- VNC (nerdery)
- Facebook (social)
- Stanza (ebooks)
- eReader (ebooks)
- Light (illumination!)
On the subject of MarsEdit… I’ve been more than a little disappointed with the iPhone version of NetNewsWire (if you don’t know the connection, you haven’t been using a Mac long enough ;) ).
Admittedly my list of feeds is a bit bloated (typically I have between 1000-2000 unread items, which I have no doubt is actually a comparatively small number by Tom Smith’s standards).
However, I’ve found NetNewsWire to be slow, crash-prone (although definitely improved with the 2.1 os upgrade, so maybe we can blame Apple for that one), and generally not very smart about the way it works.
On the whole I think I prefer the NewsGator iPhone site, which essentially does the same job in a browser - but only because it gets me there quicker, not because the interface is necessarily better (in some ways it is worse).
In the unlikely event that Brent Simmons is reading this, here’s my quick fire list of how you could improve NNW on the iPhone:
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allow me to order my list of feeds; alphabetical is so not how I want to read my news
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give me a way to read the previous item; sometime I click “next” too soon…
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update the unread counts quickly; surely you can cache the list of unread items on the server and download them first, before refreshing the actual articles?
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fetch stuff from the feeds that are empty first; I have a few feeds I read a lot, and a lot of feeds I read rarely. The rare feeds already have tons of unread stuff in them. The popular feeds are empty, because I’ve sucked ‘em dry! Refresh those ones first please.
-
fetch the articles in a more just-in-time manner; I know this may be trickier given the format of feeds, but it ought to be possible to just start by fetching one or two articles, then get the next one whilst I’m reading, and so on. I often seems like I’m waiting a long time just to find out if there’s anything to read
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be a bit smarter about moving on to the next feed or category; I have a bunch of Mac related feeds grouped together into a folder - I often find myself moved on to another folder, only to go back and discover that somehow a bunch of unread items in the Mac folder got skipped
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mix things up a bit; off the top of my head I can’t remember whether the feed formats give dates per item, or just an update time for the feed, but I’d quite like to view a bunch of related feeds together in a mixed up order; in other words, it would be quite nice not to have to read all the Register articles, then Slashdot ones, then the TUAW ones, etc - juble them together a bit, sorted by posting date if possible
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spot and remove duplicates; sometimes I end up with the same story twice because I subscribe to a main feed and a filtered version of it. It would be good if NNW could spot the duplicates and mark them as read for me