I’m sure I wasn’t along last Tuesday, transfer deadline day, in regularly refreshing my social media feeds to see if any last-minute activity was taking place at Kenilworth Road.
The Peter Kioso departure might be a column for another day, but I was more interested to see if we were going to be able to repeat the feat of the deadline day last year when a certain Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall arrived to entertain us for the remainder of the season.
I’m sure it wasn’t for the want of trying but nothing gave with regards to another body coming in, which has left us all thinking how do we fill that void?
Without being disrespectful to anyone in the squad, there is no KDH within it, so if we are going to fill that void we are going to need to do it another way, and there were shades of that against Sheffield United.
As we saw with Birmingham City a couple of weeks ago, if you have a special talent in midfield you can be dangerous from anywhere on the pitch, but when you don’t have one of those you need to overload the opposition half to create pressure.
We have the midfielders in Pelly-Ruddock Mpanzu, Jordan Clark and Allan Campbell among others, to hassle defences and defensive midfielders into mistakes – and no Championship team has intercepted more passes than Town this term – but they need an insurance policy behind them to go hunting those errors.
That is the important ingredient and Gabe Osho offered signs that he could be the perfect option. His selection offers two advantages. Having Osho sat behind the other two midfielders blanketing the defence means they are released to hunt mistakes higher up the pitch, knowing they have cover behind them, athletic cover at that.
The other thing having Osho in the defensive midfield role does is it releases our ball playing centre-backs to go and influence the game. Whether it be Sonny Bradley, Reece Burke or Kal Naismith we have central defenders who are comfortable bringing the ball out from the back and they can form another body in the attacking half with Osho able to slot in their position as cover during that phase of play.
His athletic ability also means he can cover the full-backs when they push on too, so Osho can be a perfect example of how a holding midfielder can impact on the attacking play of a team.
We only saw him in that position for the first time against Sheffield United, where his performance was tidy and more than adequate. As he settles into the role and provides natural improvement to his game he could quickly become an important asset to any success we have.
