I wasn't able to watch or even listen to the game on Saturday, though I have seen the highlights and have to say WOW! What a performance from Jack Butland. From what I've seen and read - including the match stats - it appears quite obvious that apart from a wonder display (surely the best of his career?) from the Stoke keeper then all three points would have been ours - which I have to say is a very familiar feeling I felt far too often during our relegation season of a couple of years ago. I'm not saying we didn't deserve to go down That season, and I know this is all part and parcel of the game in the top flight, but my main memory of that campaign was the number of occasions the opposition keeper played the game of his life and denied us points that could well have kept us up that year - I can think of Guzan against Villa, Stockdale for Fulham, Marshall (twice) for Cardiff, Adrian for West Ham who had unbelievable games which cost us a fair few points, more than enough to have kept us up that year, and I'm sure there are others I can't list off the top of my head. At the end of that season MOTD showed the ten 'saves of the season' and three of them were against us, which is clearly massively disproportionate. Clearly the standard of keeping is very high in the top flight, and obviously we expect to come up against better keepers than we did last season, but Butland's performance on Saturday doesn't bode well and I just hope we don't come up against too many "performances of a lifetime" like we did a couple of years ago. And wouldn't it be nice to see Ruddy put in a match winning performance for once!
Thanks for that Munky. I thought it was Given for Villa, so I stand corrected. I do remember some other outstanding performances by other keepers - especially Marshall and yet in some other matches, he cost Cardiff points. It does seem at times that keepers save their best performances are against us.
Oh yeah, forgot that one - good call skipper Didn't he actually say himself that it was one of, if not the best performances he's ever given?
Butland playing with a broken finger too makes his performance even more impressive... and also a bit annoying we couldn't take our chance lol.
We did manage to beat Butland on one occasion any other day that would of been 3-1 I think playing against Redmond fired Butland up a bit. In the 2013-14 we barely mustered two or three shots on goal per game, this season is a different story we're creating a lot more chances but we do need to be more clinical.
