Didn’t watch it, but from the commentary, I took positives. Under Puel or Pellegrino we wouldn’t have grabbed a goal. More like roll over and have our bellies tickled.
Gave them a good fight. Once again reacted positively to an iffy start. There’s lots of green shoots.
I would reiterate though, I’d be far happier with two up front that can move, and PEH in midfield. Looking forward to Jan coming back.
Gabbiadini and Ings upfront, Hojbjerg and Lemina in midfield, Vestergaard and Yoshida CB pairing for me.
Austin and Ings can both score when healthy. But until we fix our midfield problems we are going to have games like this against better sides. Good enough to throw a scare into good sides and maybe sneak a point now and again but that’s about it. And Austin and/or Ings have to be healthy. If Ings especially stays healthy we might surprise some people. OTOH, I think we are kidding ourselves if we think we were not outplayed and it was only the ref that prevented us from taking points. The question is whether our performance/talent today would have beaten a relegation side, and I think that we would have had a good chance. So today’s performance was neither good or bad. We saw a few areas where it looks like we have improved, but also many of the same issues that plagued us last year. I’ll give us like a 6/10 overall today.
I’d go with that. I think Jan improves Hoedt though as well, Fonte style, though we need more evidence of that to be sure.
+ a brilliant take down /one touch pass into Cedrics path for his cross/shot. He might not be the most flashy player but he creates chances.
As LTL said pre-match I would've hated us to play 3 CBs and not have had an attacking presence for the whole match.
Ditto. I’m concerned about our depth in attack. If Austin and Ings are hurt it can all go South in a hurry. I wish we had a little more cushion there. But for the most part, yeah 14th is about what I would have said pre-season and I haven’t seen anything yet that would change my mind one way or the other. We’ve only played twice of course, but we’ve looked very 14th place in both of them.
I'm going to give it about a dozen games before making any kind of prediction, it is still an open book as far as i'm concerned, I'm not sure that Sparky knows his best team/formation yet, these things tend to grow organically.
I was thinking on similar lines. We could see a fair bit of tinkering in the next few weeks, which we should try and be patient with.
I give it ten every season anyway. You need to. Any quick summaries of the game. Just finished a 6 hour journey and not read the thread yet.
