Jimmy Bullard was a ball hog. That's not necessarily a bad thing - he always made himself available for passes, and always played an important role in our winning the possession battle. And of course, when you do good things with the ball, nobody minds a ball hog. Earlier today Bullard signed with Hull City on a 4 1/2 year deal, leaving us with a massive hole to fill. I've touted five players currently in the squad as potential replacements: Leon Andreasen, Simon Davies, Clint Dempsey, Zoltan Gera, and Danny Murphy. We don't need any one player to replace Bullard in every way - for example, Simon Davies is at least as good as Bullard was on set pieces, so even if Davies doesn't slide over to central attacking midfield, we have that covered. Someone - or perhaps more preferably, everyone - will need to make more plays, receive and make more accurate passes, and take more shots.

The most noticeable aspect of Jimmy Bullard's game was his passing. I took a closer look at each of these potential replacements, and filtered out everything except the time in which Bullard was not playing. This way, we can see who might be most likely to step up and assume the role in his absence:

Player	Min w/o Bullard	Total Pass	Comp. Pass	%	Total Pass Diff	% Diff
Gera	22	90.0	73.6	0.818	50.2	0.030
Murphy	240	53.6	41.2	0.769	1.0	-0.015
Dempsey	240	37.1	27.8	0.747	-2.2	-0.032
Andreasen	23	93.9	66.5	0.708	3.9	-0.016
Davies	228	39.5	24.9	0.630	5.9	-0.126

The first column is the player's minutes played without Bullard. The second, third and fourth are their total and completed passes per 90 minutes, and percentage. The last two columns show the difference between the player's total passes and percentage without Bullard vs with Bullard.

For the most part, Bullard's presence doesn't have a significant effect. The percentages are down slightly, but that may be due to a majority of those minutes being vs Chelsea, Spurs (home and away), and West Ham away. But look at Zoltan Gera. It's only 22 minutes, but what a difference! He might be the logical choice to fill in, simply because he's not already in the starting XI, so we won't have to replace anyone else.

Barring some Mark Cooper voodoo magic, our FA Cup tie at Kettering shouldn't be terribly difficult and it gives Roy a great opportunity to audition somebody. Andreasen and Gera played around an hour earlier this week with the reserves, possibly a tune-up before tomorrow's important game. We'll know something before long.