Reminded me of games we played a year ago when we weren’t able to break teams down.I’m sure KMc and the lads will learn from it and we’ll move on.
December is going to tell us where we really are. We’ve won one in five in November. Time to shake things up and make some changes. I’d bring in Walton, Tuanzebe and Hutchinson against Millwall. Back in for Luongo too.
Too many players not at it today - Williams was clearly our best player for me. Not a good result / performance but it’s only 1 game and we go again on Wednesday. Need a leader at the back and Morsey needs to stop the silly fouls. He’s only 2 bookings away from a 2 game ban. We may lose luongo in January to international duty so we need Morsy in the team
I was thinking this, although we weren't quite as pedestrian plus West Brom had more quality. I thought they completely nullified us. They executed their game plan superbly and we just had too many players who were bullied off the ball and also real lack of space. We weren't awful, I thought credit goes to West Brom for the performance really but even when we haven't been at our best this season we've still looked dangerous and had quality in forward positions today we lacked that quality and also unfortunately looked like we lacked the players to change it. We've found lots of different ways to score against teams this past year but really looked unsure of how to change things today, it got to the point today where I think we should've just put Ladapo and Hirst up top together and lumped it just to try something different and get up the pitch quicker.
We all agree we werent at the races, and the Baggies bagged us! In perspective, it was our first away defeat since January and first match without a goal since February. But not a time to panic. Defense has been dodgy last 5 games, slipping silly early goals. Time for Axel and Walton perhaps to return and command the area. Win on Wednesday and Saturday, the sun will shine. We are going to lose some games!
Not for the goal he didn't. Burgess is the weak link in the defence now, he's cost us points this month. In this case, blocks Davis and no attempt to attack the ball whatsoever. The second goal is quality from West Brom, no complaints from me on that one. We need to find a way to be more aggressive in our defending, perhaps we need Walton back to command it. Or maybe it's a trade off for Edmundson's lack of pace with his defending and leadership. Like you say, we can be laboured at times and maybe it's not personnel at all but finding another gear.
He's not commanding enough for me Yorkie, toooooooo laid back, it's ok being laid back if you're good, like beckenbauer good but he isn't, he isn't even mowbray quality!!!
Harry Clarke was always on edge playing alongside Wolfenden, knew he was slower than a donkey and always had one eye on having to protect him!!
I didn't see any huge weaknesses in either Woolfenden or Burgess, last season or this. They've made the odd mistake but they also do a hell of a lot for the team in that they don't just defend they play the ball about well. Defensively our biggest weakness has been the right back position although neither goal came from there last night.
I'm not particularly overly enamoured by Burgess but he wins so much in the air and that makes him pretty vital to us. I think Williams is improving at RB every game and was by far our best player against the Baggies. Leif is an ok defender but gives us so much going forward!!
I think we ask a lot of our CBs, they're on the ball alot and we also have 2 very attacking full backs considering this I can think of very few mistakes for goals made by our CBs, I'd say majority of those are coming from elsewhere. This is nothing against Tuanzebe or Edmundson as they probably lack match fitness but I'd say they have probably made as many obvious mistakes in very few games as Woolfenden and Burgess have done in the past year. If we want to tighten up defensively I would suggest bringing Donacien and Walton back in but then we probably lose something on the ball. Apart from attacking threats coming down our right hand side there hasn't been an obvious weakness defensively in terms of where the goals are coming from.
Its a long time since ive seen us well beaten like this, even when we were chasing the game after another disastrous early goal there still wasnt any pace or urgency to our play, we strolled around passing backwards and sideways as if we had a comfortable lead. Broadhead and Taylor might as well have brought deckchairs with them so there was no service to the front players hence not a single worthwhile shot at goal for the entire match, only Williams came out with any credit as far as im concerned. If theres one useful thing to come out of this its brought everyone back to earth and the realisation that its got to be 100% commitment every game otherwise good teams will give us a beating.
Absolutely spot on FM, the slow, sideways and backwards passing was my biggest complaint. I mean, it was like a team of Ray 'the crab' Wilkins!!
I agree, it felt similar to some of the games around this time last year where teams were sitting deep and we were just passing it around at the back without any penetration. I have to say we have improved since then and so has the quality of the opposition significantly. Whilst there were times where we could've moved the ball quicker and get the ball into the opposition half WBA were all over us and we lost the ball, I would say partly because most of our forward players had an average/below par game but mainly because WBA executed their game plan perfectly. We have adapted our game since those drab performances this time last year but we probably needed to adapt that even further against opposition like WBA. Its not often in games in recent times I can't see us getting back in it but we didn't really look like getting back in it playing how we were. We lacked players to disrupt how WBA had set up and we lacked players like an Edwards or a Hutchinson who make make something out of nothing. Also I love how we play and it has worked so well in opening teams up the past year however I just felt why not put Ladapo on and keep Hirst on and just try lumping it up there every once in a while and try to play off the second ball just to disrupt the flow of the game. It did feel a little predictable and haven't felt that from us in a while but that was largely down to WBA they didn't overly press us in our half. All in hindsight and I think Taylor has deserved his chance but I was surprised not to see Luongo start the game, felt his experience would have been valuable against and experienced WBA team. I guess the biggest positive from this is its clear WBA adapted their game plan against us and were happy to let us have the ball, almost content to be the away side. We've really made sides sit up and notice we're not just a plucky newly promoted team from League 1, we're serious contenders in this division.
I thought we were passing sideways because West Brom's defence was so well organised. We had our midfielders dropping deep to get the ball, but then you had West Brom pressing us well to work us backwards. Usually when teams do this against us, we play through it via Morsy and Luongo (presumably didn't start because of international travelling?) or we release a raking through ball and create a chance. I thought they also handled Davis and our left side well. Davis is a brilliant attacking outlet, but they kept their wide-man high up the pitch on that flank and kept sustained pressure down it. They are the only Championship team that has managed to do all that and keep it up over 90 minutes. They're the only team to keep us scoreless since mid-February. In terms of our response, I thought we were pretty direct. It's an understated element of our gameplan, but it didn't work against West Brom. This is probably best demonstrated by how few touches of the ball Chaplin, Broadhead, and Hirst had (Sky infographic had our four forward players as fewest touches on the pitch mid-way through second half, and I don't think they had more than 20). To me, that's indicative of us looking to hit it direct and to keep those players up the pitch. So, if we had reverted to two strikers (which we all know I'm not a fan of anyway) and tried to make the direct approach more apparent, I still don't think it would have worked. Benefit of hindsight and all, but I would have liked to see our forward players drop back deeper and look to build those fluid attacking patterns further back and hope for a breakthrough. Ultimately, that approach is probably too high risk. As you point out, what I definitely wanted to see is somebody like Hutchinson coming on and given a brief to run at the defence and try to cause problems that way. Hutchinson offers something different to our other attacking players in that he is a genuinely talented, pacy winger who can take players on. I thought we missed that. Unfortunately, Jackson and Scarlett are not the answer to the question of 'who do you bring on to break down a well-coached defence'. As you say, better to lose now (and in an away match to a good team) to help remove any complacency or over-confidence. Managers at this level aren't stupid (well, most of them aren't anyway). Teams will adapt their gameplans and I trust McKenna will continue tweaking as he has done over his 100 games in charge. Hopefully, we can get to the January transfer window still in the automatic promotion spots. Then we can look at improving the quality of the squad, particularly exploring players that can offer something different - like Hutchinson - for when we find ourselves in similar positions to the weekend in the second half of the season.
Every game is a learning curve for us and so far its gone very well but we will come up against teams that have experienced Championship players and even players with Prem experience let alone experienced managers, and we dont have much of any of that so i know there will be games where we get outplayed, im still pissed off though at the lack of fight.
