At times, Derby were hoofing it and it wasn't going back at them and they only had Martin up front. But I'd agree with you that we needed another player further up the pitch with Hernandez. That's what happened when Meyler came on as Livermore ventured further forward.
Hernandez's hold up play yesterday was outstanding, his best yet IMO. Unfortunately he had absolutely no support for the majority of the game
Hughes would be a brilliant signing, but he's had Arsenal, Liverpool and Everton tracking him for a while, two of those were supposed to be looking at £10-15m for him ahead of his ACL injury last year.
I know we do this all the time but I find these posts so strange. We were on the back foot all the time. There was a point where the last 5 minutes possession was 12% to their 88%. There were several other times where the same stat flashed up and it was 20% ish to us. Someone else on here pointed out how easily they were passing it out from the back. Their centre halves were trotting from the edge of their box well into our half completely unchallenged. It was as if we were playing with 10 men away at the Emirates. Hernandez can do some things very well but holding the ball up isn't one of them and I absolutely can't understand the claim that he was excellent at it the other night. Martin for them showed how to hold it up. What a brilliant header that was for their first goal when the cross was all but out of reach. They were winning loads of 50:50 aerial balls near our area and we weren't winning it back. We had no one to hold it up when we did clear it. That's not particularly a Hernandez criticism it just clearly isn't his game and the alternatives are no better. Hernandez did his job getting the all-important first goal of the tie, which none of our other strikers would have scored, but for the second leg we'd have been much better off with someone like Martin up front. Either way, we need to sign someone like him in the summer whether that's as a foil for Hernandez or an alternative.
Was Anne Diamond on the bench? I did think the last 10 were crying out for fresh legs to just to harass the **** out of their back line.
If we were to go up id have a serious look at Chris Martin, liked him for a while now would be exactly what we need
Think SB had one eye on 30 mins ET. He couldn't risk taking off our only 'goalscorer' in normal time just in case.
Disagree. He might not win many headers when the ball is pumped up to him, but when the ball came into his feet he was fantastic. There was one occasion where he had 3 Derby players surrounding him on the centre-circle, yet managed to use his footwork to get the ball out and win a free kick. When the ball came in at chest hight he controlled it very well, flicking it out away from him and creating space. It's not his main asset but with the support of runners it's certainly something which he can do. You can't point to statistics when he had zero support and he was knackered towards the end. Martin had a much worse game with regards to hold-up play on Saturday and that is supposedly his forte. No player can do it all by themselves.
No just Akpom. And there lies our biggest problem. We were crying out for a striker to come and hold it up in the same way we were earlier crying out for Meyler's fight, but we had nothing on the bench. Akpom runs but he's too weak and if we did somehow create a late chance to kill the game off, you wouldn't want it falling to him having taken off Hernandez. But I don't think Bruce got it wrong. Akpom has showed more than Diomande but still not much. We just don't have a good set of strikers. It's lucky really that Hernandez unexpectedly improved over the summer given that the strikers we'd pinned our hopes on have been ****. He's a knobhead which is exactly what we need. Just like Snodgrass was a knobhead when he used to play against us.
Hernandez hasn't improved, we're just less scared and giving him service he can use rather than catapult balls for him to fight for with a couple of 8' giants. The way we set up and played all last season was atrocious. We got what we deserved with relegation and little wonder players like Hernandez struggled to make any impact.
