Did anyone else think he sometimes looked totally out of his depth today? I thought Chester made him look a lot better then he actually was.
Give the lad a chance , yes he doesn't always make the right decision but he's learning , why be negative about him ?
Average at best, continued not to mark Emnes and constantly let them get through. Not good enough and I hope Bradley plays for the rest of the season.
I thought Cooper had a decent game myself. He made some really important tackles, one particularly in the first half in our penalty area.
I am not having a go at the lad, just saying he made some mistakes and Chester made him look better then he actually was, I wouldn't mind seeing him and Sonny start (since we have no playoffs to go for) and see how they both get on.
I must have been watching a different game. I thought he did alright. Chester made mistakes, Koren made mistakes, Cooper made mistakes. See where I'm going? Overall I thought he played well.
Chester made way more mistakes than Cooper. Thought he was excellent with some of his defensive headers.
I scrutinised his performance (maybe a little too much) but he doesn't mark tonight enough and was all at sea for large parts of the game.
I thought he did alright too to be honest! Everyone made some mistakes on the pitch today but he did make some cracking tackles! Some people do like to find criticism with ANYONE in a city performance; get a grip. We won, stop complaining!
If people are going to pick any faults with the central defenders it's worth considering that Chester and Hobbs in their first games together weren't exactly flawless either, it takes time to build the understanding. Chester on his performance looked like he'd been rushed back, I can only think that's with the intention of playing him with Coops so they can be used to playing together before we even get to preseason (I'd have saved Chester for another week just to be sure he was over the injury). If we're not going to sign another CB in the summer then it's a good move but it worries me that that would mean we were going to try to play til Xmas with only Bradley as back up.
As long as the candle in my back garden is burning I won't give up hope. Bollocks I've just checked and it's blown out.
I think saying Cooper was better than Chester today is bit OTT. Yes Chester made mistakes but he rectified his own whilst making up for those that Cooper made. He had trouble dealing with the movement of Emnes unsure whether to go with him when he dropped off, and he couldn't keep up with him obviously when played over the top numerous times. Yet the same time last year Hobbs and Gerrard i believe had trouble with the same Boro attack and we conceded four, this time we conceded one as a team. I don't think Cooper played that well, but hardly played poorly.
I don't think you can blame him alone for Emnes' runs in the first half. The entire defence were struggling with both he and McDonald because their runs were good, especially compared to some of Fryatt's in the first half I didn't think Cooper was that bad at all. I thought Chester was typically classy but a couple of times he seemed to lose concentration on backpasses, if one of those goes tits up he's in serious trouble so that is probably the only flaw in his game that he needs to iron out.
Nobody's infaliable. Thought in the first half Boro had the better of us, what with the diagonal long ball being targeted over the top of Garcia. He was ball watching at times, but Chester's, Cooper's and Dawson's positioning stopped anything threatening. He did well for the rest though in fairness. That's what you want, you're players to improve. In the second half, we got wiser to their threat and Emnes seemed to change tactics, which both Chezzy and Cooper nullified.
This. First half they seemed to be targeting Garcia at every opportunity, probably knowing full well he wasn't a defender and that the covering CB was coming back from an injury so it would be a weak point. They looked off the pace because Emnes and the McDonald were both fast as **** and we seemed to be defending too high up the field to counter act it and yet weren't closing down from midfield like we should have been to stop the ball. Had we been defending deep I could have understood the DMs being reluctant to push on and leave a gap, but we weren't defending deep. I'm not sure how Cooper got dragged into the fault for that since he was the LCB though.
