We REALLY missed Barton tonight.

Title says it all, we lacked the guts in our midfield. Barton used to break up play for us and tonight he done exactly that against us. I only hope Cabaye and Tiote were having off days otherwise we will get destroyed by some better teams this season.

Good point though, and....

TOON 4 EUROPE!!!

 

Totally agree. We were to one dimesional, no one would put a foot on it and calm it down..It was a matter of booting it to Ameobi or Best...Time will tell if its a good point.

 

We miss Barton and a decent striker................what a surprise!!

Frusrtating to say the least.

 

Tiote showed glimpses of his old self, but was mostly poor. Hoping for better against Villa.

Cabaye is still adjusting, made some good passes. All will be good.

 

could have done with a LB playing too

 

Disagree.............we need to think beyond Shola.....he was gash............need decent taget man. Period. Every time they got the ball it was flung into our box.........thought Barton had a very average game!

 

Their are too many players to mention really but it's a good point

 

We've gotten 4 points without him, lets not be too negative and look forward!!

 

i disagree, it was just a ****e performance. we have played like this when we had barton. also he didnt really do much tonight.

 

I think the reason we looked so poor in midfield is because we were over run. They had 5 players to our 4. Not many teams will play 5 at home, but I still think we should swap Ameobi for Marveaux in the next game and play 5 against Villa

 

Have to agree we could have done with him tonight. Just his guile and the way he got us ticking passing wise. Wrong tactics and took too long to change. Tiote struggling and him/Cabaye had tough shift because of the system. We need Tiote back to get Cabaye going. The quality is there but he is not getting quality ball to work with. Shola is detrimental too our play and must be replaced. Away I'd like to see Marveaux off Best to add control in the middle and release the wide men. At home young Sammy deserves a run in the hole for me with more attacking licence than Marveaux away. Good way to integrate both players.

 

don't think we did think we missed tiote from last season more

said it on other posts we were over run in midfield as pardew has said in pre season he was going to play 4-5-1 WHY HASN'T HE (esp.away from home) with 5 in midfield (barton or not) QPR wouldn't have run us ragged the person we missed most tonight was tiote of last season not barton to many times colo got dragged out of position to cover tiotes arse which in turn made raylor go inside to cover colo ...result huge hole down our left.We couldn't handle the movement of their 5 in midfield they kept changing position all night and at times it looked like we were chasing shadows,when we did have a go at them (80th ****ing minute) their defence looked worse than ours
but as has been said unbeaten so far lets just chalk this down to a bad day at the office

 

We lacked bodies in midfield, not guts.

Instead of having a five man midfield and having Tiote deal directly with Taraabt who had too much freedom and was ripping our team apart we had Ameobi up front walking around, a complete waste of space he was tonight. Pardew just stood there for ages watching it, eventually bringing Ba on, didn't do anything tactically until after 80 minutes.

 

Pretty obvious to everybody watching it that he started with the wrong Ameobi. Have you ever seen Woela break sweat? Sprint 40 yds to get onto the ball? Track back to help the defence? Just about do anything useful? He's a lazy useless piece of **** and the sooner we get rid of him the better. Maybe the mackems will put an offer in for him to save him from scoring against them, but I doubt if even they would have him.

 

Barton nah, Enrique































yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

Both! Enrique was a big miss, he'd have tied SWP up. But Barton would have got it down and played as he did for them. i thought he was terrific for them and didn't get much credit. Virtually every ball fed to Taarabt to rape Tiote came from Barton. We've balls up big time by letting him go. We shouldn't be afraid to admit just because we have to move on. He was one of our better players, an integral part of our team. We missed him, no shame in that.

 

Ashley has made a huge mistake in letting Barton go, ok he hada quiet game but he still made some great ball's through to SWP.

Shola has to be dropped for Villa game and I would like to see Santon in at LB, Raylor ok but he was lost tonight.

 

if you think having barton in our line up tonight would have changed anything then u dont know much! we needed shola and raylor off and santon and another attacking midfield/box to box man on and i think it would have been a much more even game

 

Raylor has done well. I understand last night why Pardew did not give him a baptism of fire against an expereinced PL player like SWP. Even natural left backs, good one, can have a tough time with the likes SWP and Gervinho. He's done his job , so he can now challenge Simpson for the right back slot. Simpson has been much maligned and rightly so. But he is was good last night despite what some have said. Its Santon time now!

 

Agree with this - we performed like this plenty of times when he was playing last season. Also, he was really quiet for QPR - didn't get involved that much and certainly didn't shine like Taarabt and SWP did.