Great drop him, I'm fine with that.
Replace him with all the brilliant strikers we have. Sturridge has one decent season and he's the second coming all of a sudden
Is this the Sturridge who was sold by City and Chelsea because he couldn't understand it was a team game and when he wasn't falling over his own feet was trying to score on his own from every angle, regardless of whether his team mates were in better positions or not.
Well if you want to be accurate, he scored well at City and WAS NOT SOLD, his contract was up, they offered him a new one, Chelsea offered him a better one and more potential for first team. Remember at this point City were at the beginning of their "lets by 30million players for every position" time meaning youth had little to no chance. Chelsea did and still do spend big but they were further along the line and in need of strikers. he had a good record at Chelsea, but look at Chelsea, they've started Torres for 4 years despite having a worse record than other strikers at the same club.
Look up his stats before you talk crap about him, the ONLY difference particularly in the last 18 months is he's playing more. He was also usually played out of position at Chelsea. Using Chelsea's stupidity in not starting him isn't a good argument to suggest he's bad, because he was not bad at Chelsea.
Ba had a better minutes to goals ratio in the league than Suarez... just didn't get starts despite being fit most of the season. They still persisted with a worse striker because... well it's pretty clear Roman wants him to start and wants a return on the likely 100+mil with bonuses and wages that Torres cost.
Pretty ****ing good indication of how good a striker is.
Which would be really useful.... if Rooney didn't spend most of his time in central midfield pretending he's Pirlo... but you know, without the passing skill.
Also it's actually not a great indication , it's ONE indication he might be a good goal scorer, not a striker. One player can make brilliant runs, show brilliant movement and run the defence ragged all game making space for others, creating attacks, and score one goal. Another player can be rubbish at all of that and get a tap in. Goal scoring record...same, performance, entirely different. A striker who occupies, terrifies the other team for 90 mins helps prevent them attacking themselves, helps greatly in every way.
You win games, tournaments, titles based on having more players perform well over 90 minutes. Having someone who was crap for all but well literally 30 seconds in both games hurt the team badly.
Even worse with Rooney was he drops deep so often he gets in everyone's way in midfield and being absent upfront means the defence only has to make Sturridge, rather than two players making a run. He does almost everything wrong and hurt the team on a huge scale throughout the game.
If he was driving forwards, giving the opposition less time to attack, making a unselfish run to drag defenders away maybe Sterling cuts in and runs through the space Rooney makes, maybe because Rooney runs across the back four he drags players out of position Sturridge gets passed in, the defence drops Rooney and Sturridge passes to Rooney who scores.
He spent so long peeing around in midfield, he hurt the offence badly by constantly being out of position, the team couldn't work well as a result. Rooney made it EASIER for their defence, harder for our offence, and managed to fluff most of the easiest chances in both games, where if someone else was on the pitch we would have created more chances, and a player less completely out of form would have scored more of those chances as well.
