Today was up there with some of the worst performances I can remember seeing. I don't even think some of the more insipid performances under Slav were as bad as today was.
As soon as I saw the team, my first thought - why drop Berge? As other posters have said before me, Heckingbottom seems to be making plenty of changes in response to injuries, but he also seems to be doing it with one eye on the next fixture.
He's become fixated with playing a three in midfield because he doesn't see what Slav saw in N'Diaye. I can only think PH's rationale for picking the three midfielders, is because he doesn't have the speed and the creativity in Baldock and Stevens. I think he worries about the flanks getting exposed when they do get forwards, and don't have the speed to get back. RND is a bit more adventurous than Stevens because he's got more legs, but for me there's much of a muchness between the two in terms of their end products. Out of all our wing-backs, there's only Bogle who carries a creative ability along with a goal threat. RND, Baldock and Stevens are just clone players and the latter two are done for me. We really need to replace them next season.
The midfielders are just the same in terms of all being similar at what they do. Norwood seems to have adapted his game as a holding midfielder, and to be fair whilst he's not always standing out in that role, I think he's doing a decent job and does enough to keep the shirt. Hourihane, he's not the player I remember seeing for Barnsley and Villa where he actually carried a goal threat. When we got him, I expected him to get at least 7 or 8 goals for us this year. He seems to play a deeper role for us. Osborn tries, he gives us energy, but there's a lack of end product. Berge should have started today, in recent weeks he has shown he can grab a game like today and at least try and carry us forwards. None of our midfield did that in the first half today.
Gibbs-White now just plays his own game, because he knows every week that he's our best chance of creating or scoring. Due to injuries, limitations in squad depth and lack of quality at the top end of the pitch, we've literally become a one man team around MGH. At times there are too many fancy flicks, but if it wasn't for him and Sharp's goal contributions, we might be nearer to where Reading are. They've both carried us this season, no question about it. You realise it more than ever when our only available strikers in McBurnie and Jebbison have no goals between them. In this regard, again I have a degree of sympathy for PH.
Whilst I question PH's squad rotation of players which are non-injury related, I do feel he and the coaching staff know the limitations of the players we have available, and are trying to pick a team that's as solid as it can be as a starting point. However, we saw that completely backfired today as we could have easily been 0-3 down after half an hour.
I'm running out of energy to go into the details of how bad it was to get an unlikely and undeserved lifeline at 1-1, to then completely switch off again a la Huddersfield at home earlier this season, and throw away what might have been a vital point. Totally unprofessional by the players. But in all honesty, we didn't deserve anything today.
We have to move on quickly, but as daft as this sounds I'm not even really thinking about the play-offs as much as I might, because I feel the real work starts this summer where we've got to look to begin to turnover this squad. We just have to hope our coaching team get some support, and make the right decisions in rebuilding our squad from the Chris Wilder era, because that's what we really need.
