Poor Old Fisi!

So, everyone slated Luca Badoer for being very very poor. And to be fair to those critics, they were right. I said recently, he shouldn't have been given the race seat and made a fool out of. It is interesting to now note that Fisichella isn't faring much better and had a dismal race last weekend, despite his teammate displaying his usual good form.

I'm not saying that Fischella being poor, in the second Ferrari, is the issue here. I'm saying that the issue is the feedback he has had. In Luca Badoer's only race of 2009, the BBC commentator Janathon Legard was ripping him apart, with every opportunity he had. If the coverage showed the the race order, Legard would say 'guess who is at the back' or if Badoer came off and back on he would say 'any suggestions for who that is, off the track again'.

Now to the issue. Fisichella was far from good this weekend and yet, Legard's (and other people's) feedback was pathetic. From, something along the lines of 'Fisi has gone from a car with a few buttons on the steering wheel to a car with loads of buttons', through 'Fisi just needs a race or two to settle in', to 'The Ferrari has totally different wheels, brakes, callipers, suspension etc...', which is obvious to say the least. But, the big question is: where was Luca Badoer's support and encouragement? where were his justifications (when justifying his performance would have been more justified!)? I mean the poor guy hadn't raced since 1999! Here is Fisichella, a guy who has been racing continuously for years, struggling with a car (if we're honest) not all that different to the Force India car (certainly not as different as a 1999 F1 car!)

So, here's the message to Fisi's critics: Stop making excuses for him and admit he should have stayed at Force India. And, here's the message to Badoer: You didn't do all that badly, some people just don't seem to understand that fact.

Whose shirt is it anyway?

Didn't it get on my nerves at the weekend?.. and many other people I should have thought? 'Which player owns the number one jersey?', 'who owns the leftback jersey?', 'What is the set starting eleven?' These kind of questions seemed to shape the pundits entire analysis on Saturday afternoon and it was irritating, not to mention wrong.



Anybody with a slightly technical footballing mind knows that there is a hell of a lot more to football than just selecting a rigid starting eleven, whose formation doesn't change and who sees out the full 90 minutes. Football is about:

• Flexibility (in terms of individual positioning).
• Changing the formation at half-time.
• Moving backwards and forwards from attacking play to defensive play.
• Substituting players, to change the shape of play and to catch the opposition out.

And yet, watching ITV's coverage on Saturday afternoon, the guys in the studio would not stop going on about; 'who is England's number one shirt' and 'we should know soon', 'Ashley Cole is our one and only leftback' and 'how come Fabio doesn't give Defoe the number 9 shirt?'

And this issue that the team needs to be set in stone is only a recent one. There is nothing wrong (to a logical football analyst's mind) with playing Jermaine Defoe as a super-sub, similar to the likes of Paul Scholes for Manchester United, and putting him on after half-time; evidence as shown that he seems to score in those circumstances. There is nothing wrong with changing the Goalkeeper, depending on his form, and playing the best keeper of the moment. And there is nothing wrong with playing different leftbacks, especially since Ashley Cole continuously makes mistakes and gets himself well out of position.

Let's all hope that Fabio Capello keeps doing his own thing and doesn't listen to the dilluded pundits of the moment.