It was a classic game of two halves IMO. Just a shame that bad defending cost us again when it seemed we'd improved on that front.
First half, the midfield didn't function for me. Abe didn't do a good enough job screening the defence and left to big a gap that was well exploited by Noble for the first goal. Also King didn't get forward enough from the midfield to support Beckford and, to be fair to him, the support and service he got wasn't the best but, that said, there were too many occasions when the midfield had the ball and were looking for Jermaine to make a run in behind or come short to get the space for Nugent to come inside and go in behind but he stood still and didn't offer the midfield any options when they had possession. He also didn't run the channels well enough for me and gave up to easily on balls that were even fractionally over hit over the top to him. I do think we were too direct in the first half and didn't pass the ball well enough and there wasn't much movement either and because the ball didn't stick with Beckford up front, it just kept coming back at us. The few times when we did get it down and pass it properly, we created some decent chances. We did improve nearer to half time when the wider players started to come in and support Beckford more but, if I'm honest, I think that was also down to West Ham easing off and trying to just hold their lead until half-time.
Second half, I don't know what happened but we were a different team and outplayed them. Whether they sat back and took it easy or they just couldn't handle us I'm not sure and it was probably a mix of the two. One of the biggest differences was obviously Howard because he held the ball up when it was played to him and it allowed us to get runners like Nugent, King, Dyer etc. coming off him because the ball never stuck when we tried the same with Beckford who I think prefers the ball to be played in behind for him to run onto. Also, we passed the ball a lot better and we had options on the ball and the tempo of the passing was the most impressive as it was all one and two touch stuff and we used our man advantage in central midfield well. It was disappointing we couldn't have taken a point from the game because that is probably what we deserved but, if we play like we did 2nd half, we should win more than we lose. I feel we should have had a penalty. I think Kingy was clipped but it looked close to be fair to the ref and Howard had a great header that their guy deflected onto the bar.
So, whilst the result was disappointing, there are some positives to be taken from the way we played 2nd half against one of the best teams in this league. I just hope we haven't left ourselves with too much to do in the rest of the season. I think Norwich were a similar amount of points off auto's as we are now after 14 games so it is possible, but we will need to play like we did 2nd half consistently this season to do it and that should be the benchmark for this squad now. If we can find that sort of performance for 90 minutes and week in, week out, then we're still in with a shout.
