Ah well. Positives - Nice and hot here and I managed to catch some rays after the 4th. Er. That's it. We will march on. Bad day to the office.
Can't understand why Edozie came off instead of Mara either. Mara did absolutely nothing. Just kept giving it away. And the fact that we created nothing is just as alarming as conceding five too. Such slow build up play. It really does seem that every single team will know how to play against us. We've seen it in every game so far. The reason we got the wins is basically because we have better quality players. But we can't just rely on that all season. It won't be enough for a promotion challenge.
Simply changing a defender isn’t going to change it, no matter how good THB is. RM needs to wake up to the need for a proper sitting DM (Charles) with two CMs in front or a double pivot one of which being Charles. Honestly thought that had been learnt against Norwich. Maybe a little soon, but already looking like we’re going to be relying on one young DM again to hold us together like with Lavia last year.
Yeah this will be the interesting thing to see if he can adapt. He clearly has a very possession based style which, so far, looks pretty simple to create good chances against. Being able to fix that whilst not going too far away from his style is the question, and if it isn’t possible then if he will accept it and change his style remains to be seen.
We get the ball, pass it around at the back, meanwhile the opposition drops extremely deep, soaks up out 2-3 minutes of our passing, wait for us to run out of ideas, make a tackle, smack it up the pitch for their fastest player to chase, in a one on one with our only defender. Etc. That's the Championship.
Could we play both Charles and Downes at the same time? I feel like we need it to counter having our full backs so far forward.
We did ourselves no favours with that starting line-up. But even so, I've always been braced for some horror results this season - Martin's managerial history suggests that we were always likely to be a very exposed side defensively. The important thing is to keep those results to a minimum. Crucially, not many sides have a manager as experienced as Mowbray. THB, Charles, Sulemana, Che, Alcarez, Stephens: none of them started today, and yet presumably they'll all be massive players for us this season.
On the flipside it does require a lot of discipline from the opposition to keep shape whilst we have the ball for 20 mins. Sunderland did it perfectly today, hopefully we will create more in other games where teams switch off a bit more
It is a very obvious tactic to use against us, agreed. Some teams (like Sunderland) will try that and succeed. Most likely big time. (Before today, I think Sunderland's possession stats will almost comparable to our own.) Some teams (like QPR) will try that and fail. Invariably due to a lack of quality. Some teams (I'm thinking the likes of Leicester and Boro) will refuse to comprise their own principals, and continue to play their own way. Very similar to us. Our immediate upcoming games will be very interesting in that respect.
I thought I was pessimistic Honestly . yesterday we were going to piss this League . Now we’re ****ter than **** .
Weird starting XI and even weirder rotation amongst the players. That last goal had Manning and KWP next to each other and the CBs out of the screen, all game players were popping up in some pretty rogue positions. Seemed far too complicated and the players looked like they didnt know what to do when defending resulting in that absolute car crash of a performance. I quite like RMs desire to try something different but this was a terrible experiment.
Yeah that's basically what has happened in the three games we've won. Anyway, early days. First loss of the season.
The season has barely started, and I've already said it a number of times: Stu cannot play that role. The sooner Martin realises that, the better. Leaving Charles out today was bad enough. But to then play Stu, rather than Smallbone, alongside Downes in that first half was a disaster.
