Weekend fixtures — March 1st & March 2nd

Zulu relegation party coming x

 

I think it was a yellow at best so I agree with you. It was harsh. All I can say is he's caught him with his studs and the ref has seen that and just gone red straight away.

 

Pretty sure all our goals were onside. Haven't seen anyone mention offside and it looked good to me. You are right about the defences though. The annoying thing about ours is that we have two CB's that have formed a very good partnership together but Martin keeps trying to shoehorn a poor player in there when he can and we are shipping goals because of it. Having Walker-Peters injured didn't help though.

Anyway, I have a few friends that are blues so good luck for the rest of the season.

 

I can confirm we did play well. Particularly once we'd taken the lead and you could visibly see the confidence flowing into the side.

There are some caveats to that though. In the first 20 minutes or so, although we were generally dominant on the ball and looked the better team we were very shaky and error prone and gifted Middlesbrough two great chances to score. Had one of those gone in and we'd fallen behind yet again at home, all the energy would have been sucked out of the players and fans and I think we'd have slumped to another defeat. And with the way the results went yesterday we'd have been joint second bottom with Sheffield Wednesday, 3 points from safety and I think we'd have been done for with everybody going into meltdown and Schumacher probably getting panic sacked. So although the team deserve credit for a good overall performance and a clear positive response to the Walters rallying cry this week, going forward we do need to cut out these sloppy mistakes and stop giving the opposition easy opportunities to score. We were a coin toss from complete disaster yesterday and if one of those chances had gone in it would have been curtains.

The positives are the performance of Bae Junho who's finally added some end product to his generally excellent play. You can see the confidence coming into his game and feeling he belongs at this level and in this country and if he can keep that up he could provide the attacking quality we need to get out of this mess. The way he rode the challenges and bumped a player out of his way before finishing was just not something he'd have been able to do earlier in the season and you can tell he's toughened up and started to adapt to how football is played in this country. Baker's continuing threat with his shots from the edge of the box. And the general high energy of the performance and obvious extra effort and energy from the players. The recriminations about why this hasn't been there every game can come later, hopefully this is a new leaf and we can carry this on every game from now on.

 

Well, you were better than us so whatever I say about you, is pretty damming for us. I'm sure you've probably played far better this season too tbf

 

Oh yeah, agred, we've had much worse. The standard of refereeing in the Championship, which was never great, seems to have got much worse this season. I think it might be because refs are given more leeway nowadays to let marginal stuff go, whic allows bad refs to make more bad decisions.

 

The red card was an awful decision even from our POV as Brooks was in if an advantage was played.

Ref was poor for both sides, it looked to me that your lad controlled the ball with his hand for your first goal.

It's a concern how shite we look defensively at the moment, Manning and Stephens are two glaring weak points in the backline.

 

Was a bloody fantastic game of football yesterday, yeah we got lucky with one of ours probably offside, but their first was probably handball so it evened out.

Met up with some blues mates pre game and drunk in the post office vaults which is a cracking pub. Always enjoy trips to St Andrews too, proper ground and the blues fans are decent bunch (apart from the muppets spitting from the stand above into the away end).


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I really liked the defensive setup in the West Brom game. KWP bombing on allowed Armstrong to naturally drift inside without losing any width, then Stephens playing in a hybrid LB/LCB role reduced the risk of being hit on the counter and gave Fraser license to do his thing. Everytime I've seen Manning this season he's been caught out of position multiple times. A lot of that is down to his own mistakes but the system hangs him out to dry too.

When KWP comes back he should always be on the right hand side, makes no sense not to play your best players in their strongest positions.

 

was at Stoke on saturday good day out but dreadful performance from us too many changes and not good enough either we didn't play our normal short passing game on saturday either game to forget about we've got Norwich at home on Wednesday and QPR away on saturday another game i'll be at as well before i head to benners for a week