Sun Sep 14, 2008 4:10 pm
Yesterday's result and performance has certainly rekindled my interest, which I really did not expect it to do. Just goes to show how passion for your team can run very deep, whoever 'pulls the strings' [that said, no home games for me in the forseeable future, however well we do].
We started very strongly, with Reich and Nicholls supplying plentiful of ball to our two strikers. Ibehre and Ricketts were a real handful for the home defence who could not cope with either of them. Taundry battled hard and it was good to see Mattis back, though he may well be lacking in match fitness. Weston was, frankly, superb alongside Roberts after Gerrard's injury. Sansara seemed to be getting some unjustified stick at times, but I thought he did OK - still raw, misplaced a number of passes and did not always utilise Reich as well as he could have done, but he 'dug in' even when things were not going well.
At 30 minutes, we were 2-0 up and coasting. Why, then, did we proceed to mostly defend for the rest of the match? The fast flowing football disappeared, and we resorted to hoofing it anywhere. This resulted in putting a lot of pressure on ourselves as wave-after-wave of home attacks peppered the Saddlers penalty area. Although Rovers HAD to improve, we helped them considerably in our tactics [or lack of them]. Withdrawing Ricketts into a 451 merely nullified the majority of our attacking threat, whilst enabling the home side to have a 'real go' at us [that said, in one of our only attacking forays Nicholls struck the post]. I lost count of the number of times that we cleared the ball to no-one in particular.
The second half was truly bizarre, and it really wound up the home fans, which I thought was great. When Mullen came to stand with us, it was apparent that the stewards and police did not know what to do, and it descended into farce. Why he was dismissed from the technical area was beyond me, but Trollope spent a good five minutes abusing the referee's assistant and nothing was said to him whatsoever.
A great win, and a great afternoon. However, the tendency to panic and just clear the ball, could cost us big time against a better side.
UTS