Junior Stanislas is hard to leave out

We saw in the Norwich match that Junior Stanislas was able to stay in the team following the Blackburn match and keep out Matt Ritchie. It is a sign of the progress that the club has made that Eddie can now move players in and out of the team a bit more freely that he was perhaps prepared to do in the past. The quality of the squad keeps moving forward, and I am not sure if another addition to the squad may still come in as a loan if the striker department is still thought to be a little light.

Junior keeps playing well.

Junior though has more than excited fans with his pace and trickery on the wings. He has plenty of confidence about him and is already enjoying his football having scored against Brentford. The key thing for him will be to keep his performances on such a high level as shown against Norwich, when for several people he was viewed as the man of the match. I find Junior quite an incisive player who is always looking for angles to get either himself or other players in with a shooting opportunity, and he is also starting to work well with Simon Francis on the right. The change in pace of his pass in the build up for the goal at Norwich and the accuracy and weight of pass to Francis made the goal a possibility. 

I don't believe Eddie Howe sees that he has to play one winger or another because they are ahead of any other player, but he is rotating to get the best out of the bunch on any given day. That may mean that none of the wingers really feel that they can nail down a place in this side. Whether that brings the best out of the players like Junior we will have to see, but early signs are that he is benefiting from having a few games in a row, while players like Marc Pugh and Matt Ritchie have been able to have a bit of a rest and will be fresher when they are needed.