Swans played very well on Friday and did everything but get the points, Newcastle caught us cold in the first 5mins and set the tone for the rest of the game, they were able to sit back and soak up pressure and play on the break to a player who looks a massive talent and a bargin at £9.5m quid. Our football was overall excellent and we created chances though maybe not as clear cut as we would have liked. Brendens selection was fine apart from taking off Dyer too early, it made a difference to Sinclair who looked very positive on the ball when he came on, this was a game that to me was crucial to get a point from though i have to say that we played well and got beat by a better striker not a better team,cisse will be hot property in the summer and it wouldnt suprise me to see him go to a top 4 club. One thing i noticed about our football lately is the tendency to play nearly everything to set up gylfi in the final 3rd, its clear to see the tactic is to create the space for him to shoot from 20 yrds etc, but i think this is causing us major problems else where. DG and Luke Moore are being totally starved of opertuinity and that is bad for confidence and also for our overall team play, of course Gylfi is nothing short of Amazing for us and if it wasn't for him we would no doubt be in a far worse position. But think back to before Gylfi, we were working much harder to feed DG and create space in the final 3rd, and gyfli was also doing the same thing when he first came here,some of his slide ball passes to DG were pure class and i thought he was going to provide DG with many chances for the rest of the season, it hasn't quite turned out that way though !! We have missed a player who can score from long range since Bodde and Gomez and have coped well without this, gylfi's goals have returned the extra dimension that we had missed but it now seems we have sacrificed something for Gylfi's goals !! Why are we playing everything to a player that is on loan increasing his value and not mixing up our options and using everything to feed our striker who has shown he can score if given the chance? We were doing this just fine up until a couple of months back,we were exploring other attacking options and spreading the chances around the team,this was keeping the opposition guessing as well. This is not a slight on Glyfi at all, he is simply awesome and the reason why we are so close to retaining prem status, but i see the team just looking to use 1 front option and not others, is this down to what the manager is saying ? the guy is world class and it is understandable to use his talents but think back to Arsenal and WBA and the way Gylfi run the show and passed and assisted our goals, now it seems to be just picking it up and shooting and not passing and creating. What do you think ? should buck be instructing the boys to utilise more than one attacking option ? or is it the case of that other option just not being there right now ? Thoughts please
Interesting point of view there Norway, and you may not be far wrong. Since the first couple of goals Gylfi got, DG stopped scoring. Coincidence? Perhaps Bucks orders recently have been soley to get the ball to Sigg, and let him shoot. If this is the case, it needs to stop. Against the Toon, he had a few decent attempts, but there were through balls that could have been played and Moore may have scored. Who knows. But, think your quite right here Nj.
There does seem to be a situation where the manager wants him on the ball shooting,nothing wrong with that either !! it has earn't us points doing it, but from where i was standing on Friday i could see Luke Moore in positions that could have put him through on goal if the pass was early enough, there seemed to be more of a focus to work the space for Gylfi instead though. Pardew mentioned that he man marked Gylfi in the second half, therefore we should really have explored other optiond IMO. Gylfi can do it all there is no doubt about that, but its clear to me that DG is getting less and less service in the hope that gylfi gets to bend it in from 20yrds. Great when it works and it has done perfectly but a return to mixing it up would be nice to see also .
Good points there NJ if we wont be able to afford or if it`s known by the club that we cant keep siggy then when defo safe we need to use our whole team to get goal scoring oppertunities for all our foreward players . But if we get back into top half theres still the extra money per placing to consider at seasons end !
its very simple....brendan has got his tactics all wrong, he is caught up in all this hype of how beautiful and how good we are at passing the ball and keeping the opposition in awe of the way we keep the ball. It seems like he has forgotten that the object is to score goals, A month or two back we would have beaten everton and the toon at home with the way we were playing then, now teams come to the liberty confident of getting the points and that is all down to brendan, I'm sorry but we have the players but brendan has lost the plot and we have gone from a very hard team to beat to a team that is showboating for the public, we fans are being put on the back burner and unless we get back to the way we know we can play and win games by sheer skill and confidence then we are going to struggle to pick up any points anywhere. stop this over the top passing in our own half brendan you are destroying all the good work and repetition that the club has achieved so far.
We should be doing everything possible to keep gylfi swanstastic !! I was saying to one of my mates when he was looking to get a free kick shot in the last 5 mins, that he should be stopped from taking it because every goal puts 500k on his price and makes another team enter the race to sign him !! The problem we have is because Gylfi is so good in front of goal we put everything to him maybe?? like gerrard at Liverpool for example.
I completely agree Nj. More needs to be done in getting the through ball to our strikers, not shooting from distance all the time. A few weeks back I said I was unsure wether we should splash out on Siggy. Well, now I'm sure. We need to fight hammer and nail to keep this lad. We have a fairly young squad, and at 22 is only going to keep getting better. Whatever happens, we need to rival any other teams bid for him and let him decide where he wants to play his football.
We should be doing everything possible to keep gylfi swanstastic !! The prob is we aint got the dosh to do everything possible to keep him so i hope Rogers & Jenkins &Co. Can sort a deal with him but not risk our financial stability in the proccess. After all look what happened to Bodde after his value was increased due to performance improvement, and rarely does a player keep up thier goal rate long term unless at mega bucks level ! We also could do with a few more additions to the team for strength in depth . Oh what price for a sugar daddy chairman ! But after all said and done we have done amazingly well over the years and i doubt we will drop like a stone ala the Tosh era. And the loss and gains of players & managers has helped evolve our club even though at the time it seemed devastating to the team it actually helped. And the same will happen again and again the only thing they can control is the financial viability of the club longterm.
forget siggs he will be off to arsenal when the seasons over...and i hope brendan goes too as he has had his 15 minutes of fame and now he is hell bent in committing suicide with his tactics, He is a nice guy and all that but he has gone and ruined a good playing system and a winning system with his crowd pleasing tactics, its not about winning now its about entertainment and see how long we can keep the ball for, you call that football....me and many others dont and past results say so too, dont tell me we could not have beaten everton and the toon a couple of months ago because looking at everyone's predictions says you thought so too, and now all the excuses under the sun are mentioned because we threw a winnable game away when the reason is staring you in the face and have been mentioned in various radio phone ins....we have changed the way we play and if that is what brendan calls plan B then he needs to get back to what we do best plan A.......and quick as we are not safe yet no matter what anyone thinks..
Agree that money will be a problem to sign him, as long as we do everything we can do within our structure then i will be happy, of course the guy is in demand but he may just fancy playing good football for a while and building his game in a safe environment . Buck is doing great Dai, i know you love to wind up some of the guys here and they somehow fall for it hook line and sinker every time but to say he has had his 15mins of fame is a bit disrespectful IMO. though fair play to you i enjoy your different views and the fishing you do does catch many unsuspecting fellows, even after all this time...
Norway, I made this point about Siggi on another post when I remarked, that as his goals increased, his service to Danny declined noticeably. I agree that, overall, as welcome and as needed as his goals have been, it might be to the detriment of the team scoring ethic as a whole. I know that sounds contradictory but I'm sure you will understand the point I'm trying to make. As for Dai, I confess that I tend to disagree with a lot of his posts but there is an element of truth in what he says about our passing game. It is so measured, so slow and so ponderous (even totally predictable at times) that teams have all the time in the world to flood back, get organised and defend against us. Our style is good to watch, easy on the eye but, all too often, lacks effectiveness. I made the point in another article that, Wigan at their BEST, do what we do when they attack but do it with so much more urgency and more incisiveness than we can manage. Because our build up is so slow, we rarely get behind defences where most of the real damage is done. As Mick Shannon used to say, if you can't score, the next best target is the bye-line to turn the defence and we, our wingers in particular, have lost the ability to do this in recent games. We might model ourselves on Barca who can open teams through the middle but we are NOT Barca and we do not have the same quality players with the ability to do it. It is said that we possess pace. We have a couple of individuals, Dyer and Sinclair, who can shift but, as a team, we are, in fact, dreadfully slow and deliberate. Teams are taking advantage of this and countering it. Before the pelters come in, I am not knocking what we have achieved this season. It has been truly wonderful and I have swelled with pride at the accolades we have received. But to sit back and bask in the glow of all this is to go backwards and fall from grace at an alarming rate. The sensible thing is to bank the experience then go looking at what is WRONG with our game so that we can correct those issues and become even better. Do that and we will be Premier League for a long time to come.
Norway, I have been thinking about this recently, but have not been able to articulate what I was thinking. I agree with what you have said, and i'm not entirly sure what the solution is to be honest. Newcastle was quite a big game, it did seem that we were never going to score. Easier to say after the game, but it didn't seem too dangerous, and Newcastle were comformatable. side note - Seon Derry has been sent off for QPR so he misses our game. And a Blackburn las got sent off yesterday so will miss us. Think he was a sub as well.
We have definitely become too dependent on Sig for scoring. Not sure if it is by plan or it has just happened. Yesterday for some reason our wingers were playing more inside and our backs were hugging the touch line up high. Moore was so starved of the ball he was often dropping off the front line 25 yards to get a touch. We rarely got behind their back line out wide to make a cross and when we did it was of poor quality. We really lack that extra shift of gear around the oppsition's box to make something happen, create real pressure, pressure that produces chances or fouls. We were also very right sided yesterday, it seemed that the majority of our play was coming down the right wing. On another note, Caulker showed a more offensive side to his game yesterday, getting forward in open play and causing problems when he did so. He is going. be one exceptional center half.
Ivor- Agree with all you've said there. I beleive there will be more incisiveness as we grow into the Prem league, it has been a season of adjustment for all the players and im sure there are plenty of things that we will improve on and learn as we go along. I think the pace of the side is ok but does get exposed from time to time, leon and rangel often being sprinted past, im ok with that because credit must always be given to the opposition and there will always be players and teams that will just have much more than us from 1-11 . Siggy playing DG in to spaces (or not )has been something ive noticed the last month or so, it seemed like a tactic to get siggy on the ball more and use DG to open up the spaces but it also looks like this move is going into over kill IMO. It was confirmed for me when i watched Luke Moore suffer exactly the same problem as DG , until then i wasnt sure if DG was just failing to get into the right areas or was just working too hard and not able to be in the right parts of the field etc etc but i saw Luke a few times show for the ball and not get used , one thing Moore does better than most is roll his man but he just had one pass in the whole game where he was able to do this. Intresting you mention getting to the byline Ivor, i thought Neil Taylor did very well when given the chance to attck the full back and to me looked like he had the beating of him, Routledge looked to play him into the spaces more than Sinclair who likes to use him as a decoy, this was something we havent seen enough of and shows that Taylor has much more to offer if sinclair had used him more often! Our full backs should be the answer for our crosses from the by line, Taylor was very fruitful against the Toon, it makes me wonder why he hasn't been used more in that way. Our passing game was alot better on Friday than it has been for some weeks and the speed of passing will get better as we get used to the higher standard, it didn't help when they scored the early goal and sat back, and they played gutearez in midfield to help stifle us (at least thats what it looked like to me) our overall play was very good, after QPR i expect to see us back to our best but we must work on different options, sinclair has been keeping Taylor out of the game judging by what i saw on Friday and that is something we could use better to feed the front player
If we are safe and after the 3 losses do you think a little re-shuffle experiment may be worth a try eg..Give Sinclair and then Siggy a go in Dannys position or even Rangel for a real radical change ? and try Danny mid field,wing or as two up front ?? may give added opptions available if team gets raided in the summer ! It would confuse the feck out of the other teams who have supposedly worked us out ! They may have tried these on the training ground but on match day performance levels are much better ! or they are supposed to be ! It won`t happen i guess but is anyone else curious ?????
I have suggested that we might try Routledge through the middle. He has more pace and control than Danny. With Sinclair and Dyer out wide we would have a bit of oomph up front that would keep defences on their toes. The cons are that WR does not have Danny's closing down ethic nor is he as natural a striker but I think he could cause some disruption. It would need midfield support to take advantage of that but then we may as well leave DG up front if that is going to happen.
