I'll never rate a player just because "they put a shift in" tbh. We may as well have Robbie Savage out there because he put a shift in. In the modern game putting a shift in is worth very little if you continuously make the wrong decisions with the ball at your feet and lose posession through stupidity and indecision.
Also it is a myth that Comedy Iwobi puts a shift in. He's a bluffer and a spoofer. 90% of the time he tracks back 10 to 20 yards behind the oppo attacks. His runs up the wing are similar bullshit. A couple of painfully slow innefective step overs and a little sprint usually into a blind alley or stupidly across another player's path... and then he either passes it backwards or pisses it away 90% of the time.
Im not for a second saying we don't need workers. In the past we had players that "put a shift in" and were mostly known for that. Players like Romford who were the workhorse for better technical players but the likes of Romford were done a serious disservice by the one-dimensional-thinking media because Romford was also a very good footballer in his own right as well as a workhorse.
Working with video and STATS analysts? Fuck me when we had a shit player doing that during the Wenger reign there would be turmoil on here!
Tbh it truly worries me if Dick thinks analysing stats can help improve a shit player. That's Wengerthink and has been proven to be total bollocks over a period of a decade no less. How many clowns did Wenger try and improve with these bullshit techniques? JET, Bartley, Cruise, Stokes, Rankin, Aneke, Bennacer, Papadopulos, Simek, Eisfeld, Sanogoals, Owusu-Adeyie, Randall, Merida, Lansbury..... the list is almost endless.... even the likes of Walcott and the Ox did not improve one iota under Wenger's stat analysis shit - if anything they both got worse over the years.
You can only coach so much improvement into a young player. Ultimately they either have the ability and the football brain to play at the top level or they don't. Comedy Iwobi doesn't have it. Never will.
Comedy offers nothing but taking up a place a better player should fill. We can never be considered true contenders for anything while we still have utter shit like this fat arsed lazy gobshite in the starting XI.
2 years from now this waster will be stealing a living at Palace and good riddance.