Just getting back home after stopping to have Sunday lunch - with my mate in Oz, I took my wife to the game. First things first, like him or not, but Grimes is fundamental to how Martin wants us to play and he was outstanding in carrying out that brief today, and his pass to Obafemi was sublime. Yes, I know that he slows us down at times,but that his how Russ wants us to play. I thought:- Cundle is growing and improving with every game. Cooper is surely going to force his way into Rob Page’s squad - if only he had met that volley late on in the first half to have given us a 2-0 lead. The 3 big centre halves are starting to gel - although they weren’t really tested today, given the early sending off. Benda is clearly the number one goalie - and you can see that the defence has confidence in him. Fulton was solid throughout. Obafemi needs 4 or 5 chances to score 1 and proved that again today. If only we could sign 2 pacy wing backs ….. Only downside, my wife wants to go again ….
Phil I have to say I can normally see where you're coming from with most of your assessments, but for this I just can't. We have won 7 in 9. That is not down to luck or slow play. That is purely down to tactics that have won out on the day. Have your opinions on how we play by all means, but to say it isn't effective when we sit 4th in the table is quite frankly ludicrous. This gives me vibes of Cooper when I actually made a thread asking whether we we good despite Cooper or becuase of him. The general consensus was despite him. How did he then go and do at bottom of the league forest? I feel Martin is being targeted in the same fashion by a small minority. We lose him, we lose any sort of identity we hoped to keep and imo will be worse off for it.
That's fair enough, I'm not really concerned with whether we are winning a few games as to the underlining quality and dynamics of our football, and what I witnessed today tells me that we will not go far on this 'fake passing game' I call it that because compared to Martinez and Rogers it's streets away from the tempo we played in years gone by, what I saw in the Swans today was ponderous and slow, any good team will stuff us as did Burnley last week, I am not getting carried away with where we are in the table, maybe we missed Joe Allen and Piroe, but I think it's more Martinball as some call it. It was good to beat our arch-rivals, but they were so poor that we should have scored 4 or more, I think the current results and our position in the table is deceiving and not sustainable given the quality of our football, I hope I am wrong, and you are right in correcting me, but my gut feeling is not good.
