I take it from a previous post that you live away from Preston,therefore,how can you possibly comment on a player,Alexander,who is currently rated the best defender in the championship and 5th best player overall this season to date?
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Yes, I live in south east London. But I have seen enough of the side in recent seasons to be able to make some judgements even if I no longer get to over half the games in a season as I once could. I certainly retract nothing I have said about Alexander. He is not the force he was. He has little pace, he has has a habit of making unforced errors, his crossing is poor - generally a looping punt towards the far post that often evades everybody, he can be undone all too easily by a fast, tricky winger and his passing, except over short distances, lacks invention and weight i.e. he tends to chip balls forward for other players, usually Whaley, to chase after and all too often he overhits it so that it runs out of play.
His qualities - and he has them - are more those of character than pure footballing skill, though his shooting from distance can still be venemous. He has drive and determination in abundance and if you read my posts you will see that I have always made that point.
The question is how do you make best use of those qualities while minimising the dangerous - for us - implications of his weaknesses (demonstrated to destructive perfection in the Burnley game for both their first and third goals). As I've said before I think that the best thing to do with Alexander now would be to move him forward into the midfield into a sort of centre-right libero role from where he could drive things forward and get himself into shooting postions. But in order to make that possible we need a right back with the pace and skill to get up on the overlap and provide us with the attacking width we simply do not posses on that flank at the moment. I can think of no other enhancement to the side that would do more for our chances of gaining automatic promotion.
