Who is going to be replaced once Vargas comes back?  Petratos is currently playing brilliantly in the 10 role while Rodriguez and Nabbout are playing awesome out wide.  A good headache to have i suppose.

Very nice headache to have - my concern is that Petratos will get the bullet simply to fit the foreigners in the side, which would be an absolute crying shame if it were to happen.

Isnt Pato on an ijury replacement, so once Vargas is back he cannot play? Unless they've signed him under the cap?

Under the cap once Vargas comes back

In Round One when we beat CCM 5-1 we played:

Petratos--Vargas--Nabbout
---------O'Donovan------------

I predict Vargas will be eased into the starting lineup but when ready we will revert back to that ^ with Rodriguez as an impact sub.

I am simply impressed that Ernie is willing to publically motivate his marquee to increase his training efforts and apparently placing selection on performance (take note MV and PG in particular).
Also interested to note that no-one has criticized Merrick for this after the roasting Warren Joyce gets for publically pushing Arzani?

Probably has something to do with the fact that this article came out 6 hours ago?

I'm really not a fan of coaches criticising a player's effort publicly. If a player isn't motivated by it being said privately, they probably won't react well to being called out by the coach and being labelled lazy.

The Joyce/Arzani situation is definitely worse. Arzani is a young player and Joyce could have killed his confidence as soon as he started building it, and he went in on him much harder than Merrick did on Vargas. Merrick pretty much said "he's working hard, but I want him to work harder.".

Not the thread to discuss but @maxxie that will not happen with Arzani lol

Yeah my concerns about his confidence have waned a little in recent weeks.

So Rodriquez is out for up to 6 weeks with a calf problem.  Would love to see some injury stats over an entire season.  Surely the Jets would be pushing for the record.