Intxausti was 7th in the Giro with about four days left but was ill. I think he'd have dropped out of the top 10 on Pampeago and Stelvio stages anyway, but not by as much as he did. He finished in the top 10 of the Vuelta, and when you bear in mind he lost nearly 4 minutes when he was sacrificed from the front group for Valverde on Valdezcaray he could have been among the bigger names there. I'm sure with the benefit of hindsight they may have preferred to leave him in the front group and have had Cobo do the pacing job for Valverde, but you simply don't call a defending GT winner back to assist a teammate on stage 4 of a GT he's still seemingly very much in contention for. It's just not on.
The problem with these is differentiating the most overambitious riders from the riders with the most overambitious expectations of them. Until last year I'd have said Simon Gerrans, owing to his tendency to give up on the race smarts that had won him some big victories in his Crédit Agricole and Cervélo days to instead back himself in the uphill sprint against the likes of Purito and Gilbert and finish in about 7th, but he seems to have rediscovered the knack of actually winning things. A lot of the people who came into the sport with seemingly vastly inflated expectations (either on their own part or those of their fans) appear to have readjusted in line with reality now - Devolder, Gerdemann, Machado, Karpets, Löfkvist and so on.