I was at my partner's 7yr old Birthday party so missed the entire game. But several furtive looks at mobile kept me up to date. Not one of the other parents are footie fans! Will watch replay tmrw. Atrocious conditions and win ugly, and we keep our new momentum going. Any 2 away wins on the trot in this league is good. Delighted for Broadie & Chappers, both seem to be recovering their form. We aint giving up the promos yet fellas, keep chasin the pack!
A few observations: I like the look of Hamadi, and in his short time, he showed a fine first touch, good skills and power, and he is strong & fast. Like Moore he moves well to take players out and involves others. Deffo an improvement on Jackson. And he plays to the crowd! Bags of confidence, and sure KM will give him more game time. On a separate issue, looking ahead at upcoming fixtures just for fun, as we all know that KM drills into everyone, one game at a time. But lets not forget the effect of pressure on a team. Psychological behaviour often explains a sports team suddenly losing form & confidence. Pressure does funny things, remember last year with Sheff Weds! So we can expect more upsets like Borough beating Leics. Maybe most of us want Leics to beat Leeds, and I think even Spanish might wish for that too! It's probably not likely, but if Leeds do beat Leicester, it's 6 points between us and Leicester, and then 1 point further ahead is Southampton. And they play both Leicester, Leeds and ourselves. So, we can expect more twists and turns over the last 14 games. What a season! What I do know, with a few easier fixtures, we are about to fly up the form table.
I think last season stands us in good stead. It looked like Plymouth and Sheffield Wednesday, but Wednesday bottled it. Leicester have a long way to go if they fail to beat Leeds. Meanwhile, Leeds have come out on the right side of some tighter games than their streak suggests. Our March is favourable - our April is anything but. If we can build a winning run now though, we are likely to be in pole position going into the final stages.
The things for me about yesterday but also the past few games is that the balance looks right and the 2 goals yesterday highlight what we've been missing the past couple of months: - A striker upfront who occupies defenders and creates space for those behind and provides us options to get forwards quicker - Broadhead with confidence. His past 3 goals have been worldclass finishes - left sided CB, who gets the ball out wide to Davis quicker and doesn't play as many dangerous balls in the middle. I'm hopeful this will all bring a similar pattern to last season when it all just clicked after some frustrating performances where we just passed the ball too slowly. I actually think when we don't dominate possession we've often been better this season, as we've looked more dangerous going forwards
Spot on PTC, we are much more settled now, and our defense is playing in a more organised, confident, robust style, with Burgess a mountain in keeping balls out. And that sublime pass up field to Davis was superb, as was his instant control and pass that picked out Chappers. The rest was another chapter in Chappers come back history!
