Former professional footballer Dean Ashton was on pundit duties for the EFL highlights show on Quest on Sunday evening following the final round of Championship fixtures for the 2018/19 campaign.
With Leeds utterly dominating the game in our usual fashion, it’s another of those frustrating defeats for the season but plenty of positives will be taken from the 3-2 loss given how we performed as you just can’t legislate for goals against like that. It happens in the game, and there wasn’t anything riding on the match either as our Play-Off spot was guaranteed and the top two were already out of reach.
What mattered was getting through the game without any further injuries given the luck we’ve had on that front this year, but Ashton clearly hadn’t done his homework as he went the lazy criticism route and targetted manager Marcelo Bielsa for a failure to manage his squad better.
“Leeds aren’t the first team to fall away in the run-in, Bielsa should have managed his squad better.”
Pundits often fall into this trap as they repeat the lazy ‘burnout’ speculation from the beginning of the season and the simple fact is, they are talking utter rollocks, as you don’t dominate games the way we do or create so many chances if you’re absolutely fatigued.
And it completely ignores the fact that Bielsa’s options have been limited anyway given the injury situation. I think most fans would’ve liked to have seen a few more youngsters across the year, but catch 22, had Bielsa called on them a touch more than he had and we’d lost, the pundits would be blaming a lack of experience and changing a winning team because he was picking them and rotating more.
I know pundits by the very nature of the job have to come up with something to say, but you’d think on occasions they might do their homework first if they want to be taken seriously.
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