Patrick Suffaux
Well-Known Member
Tonight:
We lost to a much better side. We couldn’t handle them going forward and despite some knee jerking on here we didn’t even play that badly. The opposition have top class attacking players and we were neither good enough or well set up enough to stop them. It is however ANOTHER defeat on a very bad run. Nothing went right but we didn’t give ourselves a chance to win that. Trying to go toe to toe with them was naive and Wilder gets the blame for tonight in my eyes, not the players. They tried.
Season:
Still very good. Wilder deserves credit, Knill deserves credit, players deserve credit. Here’s the negative though.....we have lost our way. We set ourselves a very high standard with our early season form but we haven’t maintained it. Here is my take on why:-
1.Coutts injury: the first thing that went wrong. His absence is still apparent. We’re not controlling games like we did.
2. Tactical approach: we have become too predictable. High press and overloading in the wide areas with wing backs and rushing centre backs. Many of the better opposition has learned to deal with it. We need to have a rethink.
3. Dropping players that did nothing wrong: Lundstram, Duffy, Sharp etc. all either playing very well at the time they were dropped or had proved their worth so many times in the past. Players that have remained in the side have had suffering form in their absence.
4. New signings: we are 3/4 games in and I’m not yet sold on what they bring. Holmes played very well tonight so that was a good start for him individually. I’ll accept that. Evans, Leonard and Wilson have done....ok....generally speaking but are they better than what we had. Maybe they are but I haven’t seen it yet.
Summary: I do think to some extent that we are reverting to where we should be in the league, based on budget, based on what we have in the squad and based on the level of our opposition but I do think on reflection that we have lost the plot and we could have been nudging that ceiling a little had we not tried to reinvent the wheel....and maybe our luck has deserted us slightly as well. I think we’ll return to some sort of form but we have hit the season high already.
We lost to a much better side. We couldn’t handle them going forward and despite some knee jerking on here we didn’t even play that badly. The opposition have top class attacking players and we were neither good enough or well set up enough to stop them. It is however ANOTHER defeat on a very bad run. Nothing went right but we didn’t give ourselves a chance to win that. Trying to go toe to toe with them was naive and Wilder gets the blame for tonight in my eyes, not the players. They tried.
Season:
Still very good. Wilder deserves credit, Knill deserves credit, players deserve credit. Here’s the negative though.....we have lost our way. We set ourselves a very high standard with our early season form but we haven’t maintained it. Here is my take on why:-
1.Coutts injury: the first thing that went wrong. His absence is still apparent. We’re not controlling games like we did.
2. Tactical approach: we have become too predictable. High press and overloading in the wide areas with wing backs and rushing centre backs. Many of the better opposition has learned to deal with it. We need to have a rethink.
3. Dropping players that did nothing wrong: Lundstram, Duffy, Sharp etc. all either playing very well at the time they were dropped or had proved their worth so many times in the past. Players that have remained in the side have had suffering form in their absence.
4. New signings: we are 3/4 games in and I’m not yet sold on what they bring. Holmes played very well tonight so that was a good start for him individually. I’ll accept that. Evans, Leonard and Wilson have done....ok....generally speaking but are they better than what we had. Maybe they are but I haven’t seen it yet.
Summary: I do think to some extent that we are reverting to where we should be in the league, based on budget, based on what we have in the squad and based on the level of our opposition but I do think on reflection that we have lost the plot and we could have been nudging that ceiling a little had we not tried to reinvent the wheel....and maybe our luck has deserted us slightly as well. I think we’ll return to some sort of form but we have hit the season high already.
