[Albion] Garth Crooks Team of the Week

[Greg Bobkin]

I tend to read Crooks' team of the week most Mondays while I'm on my lunch break. I find it quite amusing to read, albeit from Crooks' point of view, in a quite unintentional way.

When you read it on a regular basis, you can come to realise that Crooks has pretty entrenched views and pre-formed opinions which he finds it hard to shift from and his team of the week column gives him a platform to present his views in all his usual bluster and pomposity.

One of those views that he has presented over several weeks now is he clearly doesn't rate the strength in-depth of Brighton's squad. He's brought it up on several occasions, although he certainly surpassed himself with his latest column, somehow managing to turn a compliment about Brighton's defence into a diatribe about how he thinks Brighton will struggle to keep working as hard as they are in games after the New Year.

Crooks, in keeping with some other pundits who contribute in the written press, doesn't seem to entirely understand Brighton's transfer policy, how the club has meticulously made its transfers these past few years. You'd think from him that a brown substance has been thrown against the wall in the hope it will stick.

Crooks' team of the week is usually an enjoyable read, mainly because of the absurdity of some of the comments he makes, the show-off formations he picks which involves shoehorning someone into an unfamiliar position and the flowery language he uses to back up his points. You get the impression he wishes in a former life that he could have been Oscar Wilde or Byron. But if it's insight you are looking for, forget it, because Crooks never provides that.

So he's effectively trolling or fishing, then? Why on EARTH would you make the same point over and over again – and then ADMIT that you make the same point over and over again?

Reading it in a bit more detail today, I get the impression he wishes he was writing a proper column, but has been shafted with putting together the team of the week thing. Hence all the blather about things that are NOTHING to do with the player he has highlighted, more passing comments about a game or a team. In the Harry Kane bit, he spends more time banging on about how bad Liverpool are – and how Ancelotti should be manager – than the Spurs striker! Some of it is not so much shoehorned as dropped from a big height in the middle of the feature.

I don't mind the lack of insight, I don't even mind what he says (or is TRYING to say) about the Albion, but there is no excuse for writing of that (poor) quality.

 

[JonathanLivingstonSeagull]

According to Murray on an after show program that very few probably saw, the tactic was to push West Ham out wide and let them cross the ball, and trust D&D to deal with it. Them not having Carroll certainly helped with that. 27 balls into the box I think, but very rarely troubled.

Danny Mills and Dean Ashton also thought Murray's header was a fluke, as he tried to head it into the other corner. It did look that way on the replay I saw on MOTD, not that it particularly matters.

Not at all. He was trying to generate power. Seriously annoying comments along with the 'Hart should've saved that' spoiling of the Izquierdo cracker! Even that is half because it was perhaps possible to save (by a better keeper?), and half Knives Out for Joe Hart (not surprised, I too want to see a new man in goal for England)

 

[Brightonfan1983]

But despite that praise, he still thinks were going down. Muppet or prophet?

Crooks is certainly Marmite, but he's yet another pundit who speaks as though the Premiership is the 'best' league in the world. Which as we all know, it's not. If he paid an ounce of attention to at least the Championship, which is more exciting than the Premiership by a country mile, he'd know that saying Dunk & Duffy will collapse with exhaustion in January, is utter nonsense.

He is full of tedious hype, but given his playing career, I can't help but give him the benefit of the doubt, mostly. Why he seems to have it in for us though, I don't know.