Quite often there was someone with him though or an opportunity to shoot earlier and he didn't take it. This was consistently an issue.
Again I think this kind of ignores the reality of what actually happens. When we play out, we always leave our attackers very high up, waiting for the long pass into space from Allsop if and when the time is right. This is a tactic we rely on a lot and it's pretty unusual. Most teams don't have such a spread of some players high up and other players deep while in possession. This is part of our strategy to stretch the pitch and create space and it often leads to a huge gap for someone in the middle to stride forward into space with it. We often have both of our supposedly holding midfielders committed way up the pitch when we're attacking. I really don't think this team can be criticised for not getting enough men forward. Clearly there is an issue with converting promising positions into chances, I don't know what the answer is and I'm not saying I do. I think people wind themselves up by coming up with simple explanations when we have a poor performance and convincing themselves that it's the only possible explanation and that if only the manager could see it too then we'd be fine.
I’d be inclined to try the old fashioned centre forward approach tomorrow. Play Sharp from the off and concentrate on serving balls in that the Championship’s top scorer ever (is that right?) can use. That way, whether Sharp lasts 45 mins or 90, a couple of games or a couple of months, we get the team playing to the opposition’s goal. Drop Connolly or Ohio into that same CF position and keep doing the same. Service, service, service.
We're far too slow and predictable when it comes to starting an attack, the fact that 55% of our possession this season has been in our own defensive third shows how much time we spend knocking it around with no purpose, we definitely need to improve this.
Sharp has shown he can’t contribute outside of the penalty box, we don’t create unless our striker does that.
It'll be very interesting to see what changes are made tomorrow. Rosenior wasn't happy with intensity levels although he sort of blamed himself for that because he'd been on at them all week about scoring more and killing teams off and he felt it might have contributed to us being overconfident and lacking intensity as a result. So will he drop players? Carvalho, Philogene and Zaroury were all pretty poor and I suspect it's that end of the pitch he was talking about, but it'd be a shame to bring in all this quality and then have to drop them. The obvious change is to bring a striker in but you'd have to drop one of those three or Tufan. And I couldn't even guess which of the three strikers it'd be. Most curious team selection decision we've had for a while.
And yet we've scored more goals than we have done at this level for years, and that's despite being incredibly wasteful all season.
I watch a few Championship games a week on TV and I don't think we play it around the back four appreciably more than most other teams in the division. Like it or loathe it, they are all at it - and quite a few do it a lot less well that we do.
Copied off rovrum board about tomorrows officials. February 2023 - Billy Sharp [Blades] charged by FA for " Attacking the Integrity " of Leigh Doughty, in a FA cup game against Wrexham.
Lineker to Elton John of Football Focus recently, 'they're all playing out from the back now, even the ones that can't'. The views expressed in my posts are not necessarily mine.
According to the stats we do, we have more touches in our own defensive third than any other team in the league, over double the amount of some teams.
It is an interesting stat, but as always with stats you need the full picture. Was it really for the season or just the last game? It came from a Watford fan posting it on Twitter and he didn't say which. What's the rest of the make-up in terms of middle and final thirds? Is our final third proportion particularly low? And is it necessarily a problem anyway if we're creating and scoring goals? Obviously lately we haven't been creating anywhere near enough, but at other times we have, whilst also playing out from the back.
I don't disagree with this. What really frustrates me though is the number of occasions that the positive ball is on but not seen or is simply ignored.
