Originally Posted by
the other bob wilson
A few things to say first. Craig Bellamy knows more about football than I ever will, he’s galvanised the Welsh international team and they are playing winning and entertaining football. Bellamy has a passion and knowledge of the game which shines through when he appears in the media - I could listen to him for hours.
All that said, he sounded as weak as I’ve heard him when he tried to justify excluding Rubin Colwill from the squad for the upcoming games. Again, in the interests of fairness, I must say that Ive had no particular problem with Rubin being omitted by Bellamy from previous squads - he had a poor 24/25 and it was a poor reflection on him that he often became a sub used late, almost as an afterthought by Omer Riza, as the season went on - you can moan at Riza for this, but Rubin was not doing much to demand selection todo this.
However, this season Rubin is a player transformed. For me, the main difference is physical as he’s using his height and strength more effectively, even when heading the ball, but also his stamina seems improved to the extent that he’s able to put in multiple sprints when leading our press. On the mental side, the captaincy seems to have brought something out in him and he looks like a captain out there (something I can’t imagine me saying before this season). Colwill’s physical and mental improvements have not reduced his technical capabilities, in fact they appeared sharper and better honed, maybe because he’s concentrating more on- comparing the Rubin Colwill of 25/26 with one of 24/25 is like comparing chalk and cheese.
Of course, all of this is being done in a lower division, so allowances need to be made for that. However, Bellamy was happy to pick four other players currently at League One clubs - Kpakio, Lawlor, Sheehan and Crew. I’m not knocking Kpakio and Lawlor here, they’re great prospects and are surely going to win plenty of caps during their careers, but both have suffered ups and downs of the sort you’d expect from teenagers making their way in the senior game - Kpakio had his defensive problems on Saturday, while Lawlor has had issues coping with the physicality of the men’s game. Away from City, Crew has sometimes been a sub for Doncaster, while Sheehan has more often than not been a sub for Bolton. Therefore , when Bellamy talks of wanting more consistency from Colwill, it seems to me that he’s providing more often that quality than any of four League One players he’s selected.
Three of the four from League One are teenagers and, as with Coventry’s Kai Andrews, it seems that different criteria are being applied here. It would be good to know precisely why Bellamy still doesn’t rate Colwill’s that highly when he is clearly a more mature player who is in his best spell of form possibly ever instead of the vague generalizations we got from him today because, for now, it’s hard not to believe that he just doesn’t rate Rubin no matter how much he tries to improve perceived weaknesses in his game.