He's a poacher. That's all he offers. Squad option? Maybe but an expensive one. I expect he'll end up back in South America.
Exactly. As well as just not liking us to lose, it's yet again that missed opportunity for us of meaningful minutes & experience for mainly squad / development players. Pisses me off getting knocked out right away time after time.
All we've done throughout pre-season and in the early part of this season is concede really soft goals and not look like scoring. I just don't see how that's entertaining
Full time analysis: Was obvious that our when our 3 best players went off, we looked devoid of attacking quality. However, that was Omur’s worst performance for us - and yet he still wasn’t as bad as some. Not worth mentioning those who weren’t good enough, Tim Walter will see that. Still 5 or 6 needed to get to January. I’m sure they’ll come. This result will put a bit of pressure on the manager though. He’ll be desperate for a win at Plymouth. I think we’ll have enough. Mehlem looked great. Simons proving any doubters wrong again. Slater is a player I have always liked, but he looks like he’s lost his confidence. Hopefully that’ll come back soon. He just needs to start carrying the ball forward like we know he can, rather than going for the ‘safe’ option all the time. All in all, I’d rather be out the cup, given the squad size. I feel for the keeper. Nightmare debut, and yet he pulled off a good save and didn’t do too much wrong when you look at the whole game. Let’s not read too much into this in terms of where we are heading/predicting our finish. UTT.
Can't give soft goals away and expect to get anything from a game. That's 3 goals conceded in 2 games and all of our own making. Some call this "risk and reward" football. What I want to know is where are the rewards because all I'm seeing at the moment is the risks
For the life of me I can’t understand why we haven’t signed 4/5 players from Germany who tim knows They’d know the system and make it so much easier for it to work
I hope I’m wrong but I can see this been another slutsky I wonder who the steady the ship Adkins is going to be ?
Me too Chazz This is a bit of a lazy stereotype on my part but the German gaffers that have come over here and been successful tend to have brought a fair few German players with them. I know Mehlem hasn't set the world alight yet but he's a very tidy addition for less than £1m. A few more of them wouldn't go amiss.
I think it's right that in every game under Walter including pre-season we've conceded first. Regardless of systems, entertainment and anything else, if that keeps happening we will have a bad season. We can't be chasing the game every single match. This is a long-standing issue and it goes hand-in-hand with another long-standing issue: that we have won very few home matches in the last few years. Excluding the covid season in League 1 when we couldn't attend, it goes back five years now that we've far too often watched away sides take the lead, and be able to time-waste and game-manage their way through the rest of the match. Even under Rosenior when we were pretty stable and successful, the home form wasn't good enough and time and time again it was conceding first and having to get back into the game which doomed us. And it's linked to a third problem which is our atmosphere - the mood in our ground over these recent years has been pretty miserable and impatient on the whole and this comes from people being fed up of seeing us toil and lose as often as not. Whatever your style of football, trying to get up the pitch to create something in the dying seconds whilst an away team with something to hang onto is digging in is never going to be a pretty sight, and we've seen that spectacle far too many times in recent years. We have to change this.
I pointed this out at the end of last season; in the 2023-24 season, the opposition scored first in 24 of our games (52%), which is an incredibly poor statistic to have. You cannot be going behind, making the game harder for yourself and then turning it up. Yet, that's what we seem to do nearly every week and have done for the last two years. Even tonight, we were 2-1 down and dominating the possession, yet you'd think we were winning given the way we walked about and pondered on the ball. We seem to have zero sense of urgency and it almost feels like a bit of arrogance on our part, which is mystifying given that we can't seem to beat two teams that looked bloody awful.
As for individuals, Racioppi was actually very good on the whole. Reminded me a bit of when David Raya let that ridiculous goal in against us playing for Brentford in 2020 but otherwise looked a cut above most of our outfielders on the ball. I think it's promising that he was so unaffected by the error. Mehlem looks a good player. Very good finish, but he's tidy in general, gets stuck in and seems to read the game well and find good positions. Millar isn't the new Philogene by any stretch. He'll do alright in this system where we're putting balls in the box more often (which I like) but he'll also frustrate us. He's a bit soft. I thought Jarvis was unimpressive tonight. There's clearly some quality there but his attitude and body language don't look right. He slinks around looking like he wants something else and he was often outfought. Oscar will score goals in this system if he continues to play in it. My frustration with Oscar is that it seems whenever he's on the pitch we give him nothing, and whenever he's off the pitch we put ball after ball in that he would love to be on the end of. Tonight we brought him on at the same time we took all of our creative players off, making his introduction all but pointless. Sellars-Fleming struggled. Is he more of a winger? He couldn't compete with their defenders physically. There was one in the first half where someone played him in and he looked the favourite to get to it, but he just didn't get going at all end ended up fouling the centre back who'd overtaken him. He looked how you'd expect an U21 player in the first team to look. Perhaps a useful experience for him though. Our squad is clearly still a long way off. I'm really sick of the transfer window running a month into the season. It makes these first few weeks of the season seem such a farce.
People slate Rooney but I think he has something about him. An easy target maybe for people as he made a lot of mistakes with his personal life as a player. With our one CF squad currently and a gaffe prone defence and GKs I make them favourites and Rooney isn't the complete dummy he's sold as.
