All they needed was Leahy.
You lots head would have ■■■■■■ in their own eyes. HHAHAHAHAHAHA
Guthrie was tat… proper rubbish.
Says everything about the SPL that he can look decent there.
Awful standard of football ? Do actually go to Walsall games it’s not exactly high quality .
There are some very good players in the SLP , obviously the overall standard is well below the Premier League but to say it’s awful is not correct .
Scotland has traditionally had a rich vein of quality footballers many of which have enhanced the quality of English football.
I agree not so much these days but that can also be said about English players being held back by the massive increase ( rightly or wrongly ) of overseas players into both leagues.
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Are we forgetting that Leahy Devlin and Guthrie were part of one of the worst Walsall defences in Living(ston) memory?
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Although I wasn’t the biggest fan of any of the 3 players mentioned, I think there is more to it than that. 3/4 of the team pretty much downed tools for the last 3rd of the season. Devlin was one of very few who came out with any credit, for his effort, if not his defending.
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His defending was some of the worst I’ve seen - fine going forward, but a complete liability defensively.
Good football teams defend as a team , you shouldn’t take the parts of the team in isolation you need to consider many different things , team shape , tactics pattern of play etc.
All I’m saying is that they are playing in a much higher level than they did at Walsall and they appear to be doing well .
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As I said before with a goalkeeper who dominated his area behind them as well.
Exactly. The top two are probably Championship level and the rest league one. In other words better than we are now.
Devlin walks into this team no problem. Don’t really get the accusations he couldn’t defend either. You could make that accusation of Leahy, who was an out and out wing back and more of a midfielder than he ever was a defender. But Nicky Devlin was brilliant in the tackle and had some good defensive displays for us. Suffered from being a Whitney man 
There’s a reason DC offered him a deal to stay of all the players he got rid of.
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And playing people offside all the time.
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To be fair, all were excellent, commentators mentioned 3 times how they were all together at Walsall
I didn’t mind Fitz but all three were downgrades on who they replaced (McCarthy, J O’C and Wilson).
Yeah they’d look o.k at league 2 level but when they came in you wanted players who could push the club towards the top 6 and it was more bottom 6.
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Jason McCarthy was much better though. Since leaving he’s yo yo ed between championship and league one. Thought he’d signed for Wycombe full time again but seems he’s still a Millwall player.
It’s interesting looking back at 16/17. Lost pretty much all the good players from the play off season and an inexperienced manager in his first full season yet the team were miles clear of any relegation battle as the spine of the team was Etheridge-McCarthy-O’Connor-Laird-Edwards-Chambers-Ozzy. A better manager would’ve probably got that team closer to top 6, had 52 points by early March.
Then some of those in defence were replaced by weaker players and it was a mad scramble against relegation the next season.
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The last three times we’ve come up from this division our right backs have been Tony Macken, Wayne Evans, and Craig Pead. Devlin, I think, would be well short of that quality, especially of the first two.
And Guthrie would be short of Serella, Sbragia, Palmer, Ryder, Gerrard and Dann, again in my opinion.
I think you’re right, we need to look for better signings. I’d have Jason McCarthy back in a heartbeat though.
I don’t watch Scottish football, but I doubt the quality can be great, after all Andrew Barrowman had a good career up there, David Zdrilic played for Aberdeen in the SPL, and Roddy McDonald played in the SPL but I’m not sure he played above Division 4 down here.
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I’ve been watching Walsall for 12 years now and a decade of that has been as a mid table league one team so that’s the yardstick I tend to judge the players by, are they better or worse standard than 11th place league one. Better is obviously likes of Etheridge, Deeney, Sawyers, Rico and Bradshaw who’ve all proved themselves at far higher standards and you could see as much when they played here.
It’s hard to say Devlin, Leahy and Guthrie aren’t in the weaker category given they were ever presents in a team that was clinging on to league 1 status and then went down the following year. Guthrie had left by then but didn’t he go down with Crewe?
Devlin and Guthrie did always give their best though, Leahy had a high opinion of himself and the fans disliked him from pretty early on so that wasn’t going to work in the long run.
Problem was Whitney spent much of the summer 2017 budget on them, said they were going to play in a 3-5-1-1 and then after a few dodgy early results did a u turn so that set in place the events that got him sacked six months later.
Not true. Devlin was desperate to stay.
Sure. I never said he was the best right back we’ve ever had. Just that he copped a lot of unnecessary flack and would get into our current team.
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Judging them on their time at Walsall they (Leahy, Devlin and Guthrie) were mostly substandard, sometimes okay and occasionally outright dreadful.
Whether they’re better than what we’ve got now isn’t really a valid argument given it was their shoddy defensive work that (in-part) meant we were eventually relegated.
Oh god yeah. Norman fails even the mid table league 2 yardstick.