Opinion: Cole Palmer criticism is ridiculous

You can tell that it’s an international break, people are getting bored and starting debates for no reason whilst offering ridiculous over-criticism.

The fickleness of the footballing world reared it’s ugly heads again this weekend, and the true colours come out once more.

In the last three weeks, pundits, outlets, fans, and anyone involved in football have been running out of words to use to praise Cole Palmer. It’s literally been a Cole Palmer festival. I think on the live blog at one point I had like every other post as a post about how good Palmer is!

But then along comes one bad performance for England, and out come the pitchforks. It’s expected, it happens all the time. But it just goes to show how there is such a lack of balance in reviewing football out there.

Palmer wasn’t even hideous against Finland for England last night, but we all saw he was not on his game at all. Guess what? He is human, he is not always going to be able to perform to the top of his game, he will have bad days in the office.

Rating him a 2/10 was just extreme by Adrian Durham at talkSPORT. I’ve done some extreme ratings in my match reports over time, but it takes a real nightmare of a performance for even me to even rate that low.

Palmer was quiet, not on his game, and not at the races at all for England on Sunday, but I wouldn’t call it a 2/10 nightmare.

And besides, context is important. Asking Palmer to hug the touchline as a winger just isn’t it. He isn’t an out and out winger. He is much better when he has the freedom to come inside and operate centrally. He is even better when he actually plays in a central position, I think we have all seen that from his recent performances at Chelsea.

I am disappointed that he didn’t play better though, because this was a good chance for him to nail down a regular spot as a starting England player now. But that isn’t overly important anyway because there will be a new manager coming in to England soon, and he will be looking at his setup and what he will be using going forward. Lee Carsley has just been doing a lot of experimenting really. He played Palmer in a double pivot for one game, then a touchline winger the next!

Palmer is going to have off days though, it’s just normal. But unfortunately now, because he has been SO good of late, his off days are always going to be highlighted even more. They love a player when they’re up, but they love to jump on them even more when they are down.

Palmer wont stay down though, we know that. He has the confidence to bring himself back up, he will ignore the noise and focus on his own self-belief.

It’s just one game, a game in which he was playing far too wide. He didn’t look at it at all, but that happens.

The media need to calm down both ways. I knew there was just far too much praise going around the last few weeks – it was almost too good to be true. They will all love him when he’s on fire again though.