[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Fifteen or twenty minutes is a fair amount of time in football when you consider that it takes no longer than twenty seconds to run from one box to another, a couple of seconds to beat a man and put a cross in, and a couple to score. A player can't always change a game single-handedly, but if they've got the quality and the desire, they can at least show the kind of threat which books them a starting place in the next match. I wouldn't say that Gamboa's necessarily done badly when I've seen him, but I haven't exactly sat up in rapt admiration of his attacking skills, either.

Again; the coaching staff undoubtedly make their fair share of mistakes, but if a player's tearing up the training pitch five days a week and showing the quality and drive which could really be the missing piece of the jigsaw for us, I fundamentally don't believe that Alan Irvine then says "sorry mate, I can't put you in the starting line-up because you're not slow and British enough." There are things here which we're not seeing, which we're not privy to.

Pointing to last season again, all kinds of conspiracy theories did the rounds about why Clarke was leaving Berahino out of the starting line-up, but over time - when we got so desperate that we were throwing him on every week - it became obvious that he didn't really have his head screwed on at that point in time, and Clarke had obviously been trying to break him in gently. None of us knew that in the autumn, so it all became a storm of "Clarke's a muppet", "Clarke's clueless", etc.