The display against Everton was one of the most negative performances I have seen by a McCarthy team. Everton were nervous, playing without confidence but we basically handed them the three points.
The inclusion of Milijas made me think we were going to try to play football, with Edwards and Hunt out wide it seemed the focus would be working it through the middle. I felt sorry for Nenad out there as he seemed the only one trying to keep hold of the ball, but with so little movement he was restricted to giving it back to a defender.
When our best attacking threat is our left back, I think you need to recognise something is wrong. The question is, will Mick see this? We've had ten games of it. No urgency, no movement and no pace at all. Stephen Ward wa superb again, and with the efforts of Wayne Hennessey and Christophe Berra, the only thing looking likely to keep us above the bottom three. Once again he showed his adaptability by being a better right back than Richard Stearman.
Our wide men were anonymous, offered no support and the result of that was Doyle losing it every time he gets it. In Doyle we have a fantastic footballer, but when he is so isolated he looks average. Another player I feel sorry for out there.
And when Fletcher was finally brought on, we suddenly had another option and found small amounts of space. Two minutes into his arrival we had our first shot on goal, it was a rubbish shot but unlike the rest of the team he looked like he wanted to score.
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| We would have been lucky to get nil, let alone one. |
Stearman - 6
Johnson - 7
Berra - 8
Ward - 7
Edwards - 5
Henry - 7
Milijas - 6
O'Hara - 6
Hunt - 5
Doyle - 6
The most worrying thing is that this time last season we were on a very similar run, but we remained upbeat because of the way we were approaching games. There is no reason this time round to suggest our form is going to change.
The most frustrating thing about this is that we CAN play football - the first couple of games proved that.
ReplyDeleteWhat's happened? Even the Wigan win, though nice, didn't have us playing at our best... We tend to play well against the top teams though based on our Liverpool/Man City performance and last season so let's see what happens next week...
Stating the bleeding obvious I know but it's all about confidence. For ten minutes after we scored from our somewhat fortuitous penalty we looked like we actually believed we were going to win, then Roger and Richard lost out to Jagielka at a pretty straightforward free kick and the brief flicker of light is extinguished and our fragile eggshell ego reveals itself again. O'hara gets himself suspended from the game at chelsea with a pointless act of dissent over the dubious penalty (not that we have room for complaint there, given how Karl got away with a blatant tug in the box at the end of the first half) and Mick, most worryingly, says he thought it was a decent away performance. I suppose it's better than O'hara is out of that game than the crucial home games to follow. The truth is, and the anti-mick crowd won't like this, that Ward is the only player performing to the required level EVERY week. Others (Henry, Berra, Doyle, Hunt, Hennessey) are giving their absolute all but one player playing consistently well is nowhere near enough and suggests it's going to be a long hard winter.
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