Dismayed how effectively parking the bus can be so effective Pulis and West Brom won their game yesterday with 20% possession!!!!!!!!!
With all that WCT costing mega millions playing in red & white. Myhill made some incredible saves though!!!
Good luck to ´em I say, just as dismayed if not more so, at United´s inability to find a way round them - there never has been, or ever will be, a right and a wrong way to get a result, and after all, Pulis is a master at it.
Would you feel this way if I ask you to cast your mind back to the Middlesbrough game? We were gutted and it cost us!
Yes, I feel exactly the same way, the only thing that was dispicable about the way Middlsbro played on that day, was their blatant time-wasting and feigning injury, otherwise their gameplan was spot on, and it worked. Hopefully if we meet them in the play-off final, we will have learned our lesson. And incidentally, do you imagine for one minute that if we should get through to the p-o final, and manage to get a lead, with say 20 - 25 minutes remaining, that we wouldn´t also shut up shop and take a 1 - 0.
Don´t get me wrong , Ox, I love attacking, entertaining football as much as the next man, but not if it doesn´t win you any games, and I will be very interested to see the battle between what ought to be two completely different styles, in these next two games. One would hope for the sake of football purists, that the dour, siege mentality wouldn´t win through, but they are there on merit as much as we are, just a different sort of merit, that´s all.
You make a good point RBF and not sure what the results have been in previous finals, but I listened to the commentary on last year's and had Greeno not been in spectacular form, then Derby would have won it. I do feel really sorry for their fans at being knocked out of play offs, but their defence in the last few games has been shocking!!!
I'm not sure we would actually RBF Neil's style is to try to keep it quite solid, but create little opportunities to tempt the opposition out (that's essentially what he said, and how it pans out). There's risk in that strategy because it opens us up at the back, but it's not as bad as the gung-ho defensive shambles we saw under Adams. It does mean, though, that I don't think we've ever sat on a 1-0. Neil clearly, (at least to my mind) is always thinki about the two goal cushion. And frankly I think that's for the best because time and again over the last few years our defenders have proven themselves capable of doing something spectacularly stupid. So I don't think we'll park the bus until we're 2 up. That's what it seems to me anyway.
Point taken Rob, but it was more the footballing principle I was really arguing for, all out defence is no better or likely to be any more successful, than all out attack, but there is an art to defending and keeping goals out, just as much as there is to attacking and finding ways to score, and actually there aren´t very many managers or teams that are consistently good at both. Personally I can find just as much beauty in a good, solid defensive performance as I can in a free-flowing attacking one, sometimes more actually, especially if it can bring a win
I'm with you There's definitely more than one way to skin a cat. And I'm strongly opposed to any dogma which assumes only the way that person says it should be is right
Prefer this as. More balanced viewpoint. I do remember a play off semi when Leicester's Julian Joachim dribbled all around John Beck's Cambridge to score the winner - this really was a victory for football. Mind you they were undone in the final by a despicable David Speedie dive. I worry Bishop went over a bit easily yesterday in the box. Just think our back four have to watch their challenges that's all!
