Match Day Thread Hull City v Ipswich Town

Yes a tap in in the cup, good on him.

 

Still a goal though to be fair to him. Another weird dislike, you seem to notch them up more than me!

 

Joffy put a shift in but he can't do it all on his Jack Jones. Ndala is going to frustrate me as much as Jason Lokilo did....Joseph tries and puts himself about, but effort is no substitute for a lack of talent at this level. We go again on Saturday, but beginning to look as though the run to Christmas could be a hard watch.

 

Yeah, I don't really understand this sudden disappointment at the revelation we're not actually good enough to be a play off team. We're a team of mostly free transfers and loan players, the fact that we started the week around the playoffs is astonishingly good.

All said, a mid table finish is where I think we'll end up until we are allowed to spend money again. But this defensive cock up stuff has the hallmarks of Slutsky at the moment. We're better than we're playing but we're also hampered by injury. I have faith Sergej will fix it.

 

Can't judge belloumi in any way on tonight, played 25 mins in a team that could barely get passed half way line.

I wish we'd started Destan up top, wasn't til he came on that we won a header up front, every time we went long it just came back, really lacked a target up top.

thought both full backs did ok tonight, Coyle was good up against Clarke and Giles did his job very well plus covering for Hughes a number of times.

Our main struggles were with the ball for me, couldn't keep hold of it or progress up the pitch so Ipswich just kept coming at us, and when you can bring on a 20m quid winger and a striker who 18 months this ago went for just a bit less that says a lot, under that consistent pressure there was always likely to be a moment where they got free

 

If we are lucky with injuries then I don't think we are worse than Sunderland last year.

*** BIG IF ***

 

nah, no chance if Hughes delays his jump by half a second he heads it clear, was 100% his ball to win, just flubbed it and tbf he knew it

 

I think some are overreacting to that. We were clearly inferior on paper, but we fought, made a game of it and had created the only real chances of the game in the first 70 minutes or so despite playing largely on the break. It was frustrating to go behind to such a stupid goal (and then another shortly after) when we'd handled them so well and restricted them to so little. If it was a Philogene banger or something it'd be less frustrating, but really we threw it away when we'd done so well to that point. We obviously lacked a bit of quality in the attack, maybe the first time I've really thought we badly missed McBurnie. Maybe with a bit more quality up there we'd have gone ahead earlier in the game.

We again had to work around the fact that Pandur when pressed really cacks himself and often has to accept just kicking the ball back to them. I thought tactically it was a really awkward game for us and Sergei did well to find a way to make it work. Just a shame we threw it away.

We've been spoiled by good centre backs over the last 10, 15, maybe 20 years. Hughes is more talented than most of them but the actual outcomes with him defending aren't as good as they should be. You can definitely see why there's talk of a move for him, but he should be so much better at the basics sometimes. Greaves, Turner, Chester, Davies, Maguire, Wayne Brown, even the likes of Bruce, Hobbs, Anthony Gerrard or more recently Jones and McLoughlin. None of them would inexplicably miss that cross and let a little midfielder head home unchallenged behind him. None of them could ping a 50-yard pass like he can, and last home game he gave a brilliant all-round performance but too often he fails at the more simple stuff and costs us.

 

11 games between now and Christmas, we have to use the subs. Unfortunately we had little o

i agree with all you say but he’s not the second best defender in the world

 

Also don't think we need to go all humble and say we can't hope for more than mid table because we've lost a couple. Look at the teams in this league. Preston and Millwall always seem to end up in and around it and their wage bills will be nowhere near ours. Our squad isn't on a par with Ipswich's but it's still very good, and this is a league where you can compete with relatively modest resources if you have the right mix of qualities. We've been doing that and hopefully we continue to.

 

We could still be playing now and we wouldn't have scored tonight. Never looked like doing so. Thought we did okay 1st half, but the difference between the two benches was massive. They could bring on Philogene and Akpom (who, given our current injuries would both be starters for us)

The ref was not the reason we lost the game - we lost because we weren't good enough on the night - but he was more biased than the BBC. He might as well have had a blue shirt on.

 

Without our current injuries both would be starters now.

 

I've said previously (literally in this thread) he may well be a great player in 5 years time but that's pretty irrelevant. He's been here almost half a season and has offered very little offensively. He was worth a gamble as Amin said but it hasn't worked out. It's not a weird dislike at all, and the manager clearly sees things the same as me which is why Ndala not Joseph came off for Destan. It's why Coyle continues to start at RB despite your dislike of him. It's why when I backed Slater through his dip in confidence last season he's come good out the other side of it. I wrote Lokilo off very early when others said he just needed time, and it's the same with Ndala and Akintola. We gamble on these cheap wingers and they rarely if ever work out. It happens.

 

Haha I did make the Slutsky comparison on the pod, but at least we seem to be scoring a bit more frequently than back then, and edging high scoring games a bit more often. I think a lot will come down to how quickly McBurnie, Lundstram and Millar get back up to speed, but a mid-table finish wouldn't be the end of the world, with hopefully a platform to improve next season with a few additions.

 

Plenty of us do see it. At no point has he ever been a big money or premier league player. I’m sure one day it will come but right now he is so rash he cannot really be trusted in defence. A spell out of the team could do him some good because he is constantly making errors, some punishes some unpunished but I do think he is a big reason that we leak so many goals.

 

'One mistake cost us' - reaction
Hull head coach Sergej Jakirovic told BBC Radio Humberside:

"I can split this game in two parts - until 70 minutes we were almost perfect because we controlled everything, even though Ipswich, in this league, maybe have the best possession.

"First half they didn't have any shots towards our goal, so this was good. But on 70 minutes it was a crucial moment for me because we made one mistake which they immediately punished, but this was the quality of Ipswich.

"We tried to take more risks but unfortunately we immediately conceded a second goal - I don't know if it was offside.

"The first was a very poor goal because we had a full defence, the cross was not so sharp that you cannot defend it. If not, maybe it would have stayed zero-zero or we would have scored a late goal."

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08:58
Media caption,
Jakirovic on Ipswich home defeat

Ipswich boss Kieran McKenna told BBC Radio Suffolk:

"It was a tough game and I thought we showed the things you need to show in the Championship on tough midweek nights when you're not playing on a perfect pitch.

"Our intensity was good, our defending was really good, the only chances we gave away were from a couple of turnovers - our press was good and made it hard for a good footballing team to get any sort of moves going.

"We didn't have as much control of the ball as we'd have liked in the first half but you have to have that base of hard work, intensity, organisation and resilience that we showed, and if you do that, then you know the goals can come.

"We scored a really good first goal and you could see the difference that made to the game, confidence comes into the group, the opposition open up some more spaces and stop working so hard to stop us, and we looked a big threat in the last 25 minutes."

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03:02
Media caption,
McKenna: 'A good night's work to build on'

 

It makes you look back at the QPR game, we went ahead 2-1 and sat back. Ipswich got their first goal and went for the 2nd, which is what we should have done at QPR.

For 65-70 minutes I thought we kept them at arms length, but Burnsey on Tiger+ was right, he said 10 minutes before they score Nunez was getting into some dangerous positions and so it proved.

Defensively on the whole we looked much better organised, just Hughes misjudging the cross did for us

We need to try and get something from both the Stoke & Boro games to stop the run of defeats, The team that has done so well for us over the last few games needs freshening up, so Belloumi/Oli/Lundstrom and Millar will be welcome returns.

 

I thought Ajayi was excellent, one of, if not the best, performances in the side. Reads the play very well and breaks up attacks very effectively. Gelhardt looked leggy and off it to me, but needs to get through this next game. McBurnie and Millar supposedly back for Boro would be a big boost.

 

No but they have just renewed their season tickets, and off the back of an expensive season going to multiple finals, plus they’ve just bought tickets to the Club Challenge and many are going to Vegas early next year.

It’s been the best and most expensive 12 months to be a Rovers fan, it wouldn’t surprise me if a few have dropped off going to the football this year.

According to you, no FC fan supports City anyway so why would they be going?

 

Well Ipswich were small and lightweight and still hustled us too much . we have so many players trying to come away with the ball from a challenge - before actually winning the ball ! They were fairly mobile like QPR but nothing special - and McKenna kept Jaden and Akpom back as an away match tactic . We do things like this sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t . Joe is leggy now as he’s been doing it on his own for weeks .