In your rush to hero worship Eze you appear to have missed the general gist of my post, which is that the midfield must be balanced to bring out the positive attributes of each player and how they fit into the overall scheme of things on the pitch. It may be that Vieira is completely happy with Eze's inability to tackle or header; whatever, the midfield for me is disjointed and Eze is one of the reasons for that. As PatrickA mentions above, we can't afford to have a midfielder who for long periods is not involved in the game. A player with Eze's skilful ability needs to be on the ball, not drifting around isolated from the game. This is Vieira's problem to fix. Whatever you think about Gallagher, he was the glue that held it all together and made the midfield tick over last season.

You must have a player who can do 2/3 things a match to create a goal, the problem is schlupp is not a CM player, i like Schlupp, but as wing cover, Kouyate, Doucoure, and Eze is a balance midfield, Eze, Gallagher and Doucoure isn't balalanced, nor is Gallagher, Doucoure and Kouyate, the only midfielder we have to play a balanced midfield is McArthur, but he is sadly injury prone.

“That’s a joke son, I say, that’s a joke.” “Nice boy, but he’s sharp as a throw pillow.” “He’s so dumb he thinks a Mexican border pays rent” “ “Son… I say, son, some people are so narrow minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”__ Forhorn Leghorn

If you stayed up to MOTD's bitter end last night, you will no doubt have been as underwhelmed as I was. For those who didn't, we were first treated to a lengthy song of praise for Arsenal by you know who, followed, to show BBC balance, by a "contribution" from Shearer on Palace, which went roughly as follows: "Palace have had a difficult pre-season. They had two chances but they didn't take them." Well, I suppose that's the sort of incisive analysis we pay for.

There’s a Sky commentator who is as bad.
I’m not sure whether he is in thrall to the big clubs or whether he can’t be bothered to do his homework about the so-called lesser sides.
Every Liverpool/ManCity/Man Utd/Arsenal move will be described in great detail and with great excitement. If it's Palace (or sides of similar status) on the ball, he will talk about the ‘big' team’s players, their history, their achievements and everything apart from their groundman’s shoe size.
And I still suspect Sky had a sound effect mic by only the Arsenal section for Friday's match. Either that, or our fans were silent for most of the 90 minutes.

Does anyone actually still watch the whole thing live these days?? With the technology we have at our finger tips, MOTD is for recording and just fast forwarding all the waffle, it’s been dreadful for years now.

Agree! It makes Lineker's seven-figure salary ever-more absurd.