Doc Elder Emmanuel All three were given ridiculous amounts of work to do Add Burke to that too Hall of shame Magennis Smallwood greaves Wilks eaves slater and definitely mcann unable to change it to any degree or even believe it needs changing
Docherty Emmanuel Elder But well beaten. Ridiculous not to have KLP from start. McCann should show some balls and resign over it.
Docherty Elder Emmanuel who looked knackered towards the end. Should have been taken off with 10 mins to go because the fella was out on his feet. Beaten at home by a bang average League 1 team. Eleven days before our next game. We will come back all half a stone overweight or raring to go depending how McCann handles it. A fourth straight defeat after a break like that and the **** will hit the fan.
Docherty, Elder, Emanuelle in any order... as said Burke was excellent too.... the rest, they'd struggle to get a game in many other sides...
Aside from Emannuel 1) Weak 2) And 3) Insipid Where is the player that imposes himself on the game? Not Honeyman, who does lots of running and has deserved the MOTMs so far, but the Gareth Roberts type, the Ian Ashbee, the Gary Brabin, the Warren Joyce, the Whitehurst? The player that will carry and drive the team on due to lack of clear instructions from the 'coach' on the touch line. Stick the foot in, give MacGennis a bollocking for giving the ball away for the first goal, that sort of thing. Portsmouth were the latest ordinary team (and they may be historically 'bigger' than us like Blackpool, Sunderland, Charlton etc), but lets be clear, in an ordinary division. From a commanding away performance at Ipswich, to very poor tonight. More to do with other teams sussing the 433, than the KLP issue which obviously doesn't help. Poor.
As regards the Ipswich performance, I know an Ipswich fan and he told me we would turn them over. He quoted the surprising facts about what a false impression their position gave, their lack of success against teams higher than them for getting on for 18 months. Which is why .I didn't get too carried away by the result, pleasing as it was.
Mick Mill's comments during the Ipswich game, scathing at the time, are becoming more apt with each game. 'How is this team top of the league', 'No quality, final ball is always terrible', etc, etc.
It's all pointless until McCann goes. Yes, it's ultimately Enob to blame but for now McCann is the 'coach'' and needs to go.
Sour grapes from Mills on the night. What he saw (no quality, final ball etc) isn't what I watched. But he was prophetic, because that is what happened tonight. You could say there was no/little real threat from Pompey, they just coasted along managing the game in the way that probably Kenny Jackett instructed them to. City showed no real threat and there was a lack of quality all over the pitch from us, excluding Emmanuel.
Don't think many got carried away by Ipswich. Not me, especially given his obstinate refusal to adapt from 433. But maybe, just maybe at that time McCann might have been starting to prove that his way could work given his experience at it, at this level. Those thoughts were dashed as L1 managers started to suss City out - 13 games - catching up with what us armchair experts have witnessed over the last 18 months. And, with due respect to some historically bigger clubs (Oxford? Blackpool, Portsmouth) and to some less bigger ones, the standard of those teams beating us has been ordinary, nothing special. But we have come up way short against all of them. Which brings us back to McCann. An inexperienced, inflexible wrong man for the job. Hope he/the team, can turn it round. At present it seems unlikely though.