Back in more tolerant times today's efforts by Fletcher and Graham would be described as at least being in a position to miss. Goals breed confidence and belief in strikers as shown by Kane whose shooting was average but he was willing to let fly once he spied the posts. It will come for our lads now that we have given them more support.
Of course, all we have been saying is he needs to tweak the system, he did this today and we looked a better team for it. We were the best side in the first half and we had chances to score in the second, with a bit of luck we might have won it, Gus found a winning formula last season and I sense he is edging towards doing it again, I just hope when Catts gets back he does not revert to a 4 1 4 1, I thought Santa looked good in the back three today and this 5 3 2 line up looked very good, I am certainly more optimistic after to-day's performance. What a difference a tweak makes. Just imagine what a couple of home wins would do, and we have never had a better chance than the two games coming up. Perhaps the signing of Defoe heralds a new "system", a winning one, to-day was very promising as Spurs are a very good team and we ran them close.
I was impressed with Danny Graham when he came on today as he looked sharp, hungry and was very unlucky not to score..
I've relentlessly slaughtered the bloke but have to admit I've seen a change in him. I've no idea why but I'm not stupid enough to form an opinion then stick to it despite evidence to the contrary. There's too much of this 'he's brilliant/he's shyte' in my opinion. Cattermole was a total fkn liability and now he's our biggest miss.
It wasn't just DG's misses though, Wickham upheld his defensive duties by at least trying to disrupt naughton and stop him advancing. DG let Rose do has liked with no effort what so ever to get to him. Rose advanced into our half at will in the closing 20 minutes. We were chasing the game but we're not going to create chance until we get the ball back. Wickham seemed to understand this where as DG just didn't give a ****. Loan striker needed for me. Someone who'll actually appreciate their chance to shine and show willing on and off the ball. Ship DG out on loan if anyone will have him. Nobody will want to buy him that's for sure.
Cracking support from you lot today, turned up in large numbers and were vocal throughout. I'd say that was by far and away the best away support at the Lane this season.
Our away support is cracking this season as usual..It is our home support that has been really down this season, but hopefully this will improve with the signing of Defoe which will make us a more positive attacking force..
Larsson - We should have won it 17/01/15 7:17pm Sunderland goalscorer Sebastian Larsson said his side should have gone on to win the game at Tottenham
...even though we had about 24 shots at your goal compared with about 8 that you had at ours, and despite the fact that we had a perfectly good goal ruled out?
Why not take it up with the person who said it ....... no one on here has said anything of the sort. Perhaps Larsson is saying, "When we got the equaliser we should've pushed forward and tried harder to win the game." It seems to me that he's actually criticising Sunderland's performance rather than claiming 'We wuz robbed'. Then again I'm one of these eccentrics who doesn't allow my arrogance to make me only see things from my blinkered viewpoint
All the talk of systems and formations it seems the team has this inbuilt mind set to bring teams on to them almost like a ALI style rope a dope he adopted ,we are still need to play and defend further up the pitch ,you can argue that playing so deep there is no room behind the fullbacks to exploit however the room in front of goal on the edge of the box is/was massive ,,tthe running of defoe will prove vital im sure ,catts back in front of the defence will plug that hole . WE MUST BEAT BURNLEY
If we defended higher up the pitch we would get slaughtered with the current CD's, we played well yesterday, but at 1-1 we should not have stuck with two up front imo.
Tough game away from home fella, they were always going to have the better of possession fella and push us back, they're just a better team, should be with the money spent too. Burnley will be the game to judge our mentality in the new system for me like.
