Yes, we've not been convincing twice now against nine players. Older fans will remember a game against Portsmouth in the 80s when they had three players sent off. They must have been one of the dirtiest teams to have come to the Lane. We still struggled to beat them and relied on a Paul Mariner own goal. We also had a player sent off that day.
Yes I remember that game, in fact I read something about it somewhere very recently, may have been on a Pompey football site. They had a player called Tait who was simply evil. He got sent off that day I remember it well.
As for us not being convincing against 9 players in the last two games, I agree with you entirely. The thing is, the more time and space we've got the more we use it. The players need to still play with the fast tempo moving the ball into the danger areas quickly when we are facing 9 men - but instead we take the opportunity to dwell on the ball a bit more and look to stroke it around, playing this game of cat and mouse, looking for a gap, that's not very effective. We saw the other night that we were short of ideas when it came to how to break a 9 men defence down. Our main ploy was to hook the crosses over from the flanks into the box. This is easy meat for 9 defenders. I was crying out for us to run at them directly and take them on, to get around the back of them or at the very least, have a shot. But we went a bit like the football under Adkins where we got to the 18 yard box and then started moving it side to side. Fortunately, and belatedly, we got a breakthrough, which was not down to us hooking in another cross, but due to a quick one-two in the box.
The result against Bury the other night changed the entire mood of the crowd. If it had finished 0-0, as it very nearly did, then fans would have left the ground fuming in anger and frustrated at the whole inability we showed to break down one of the poorest teams at this level, on home ground, with only 9 men. We would have had fans on here slating the team and calling for the manager's head in some cases. But we've never had any of that negative wash, because...we won. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned though at how much we struggled against such a poor team with only 9 men.
I hope we don't have to face anything less than 11 men for the rest of the season, but if we do then I hope we can reflect on this and learn from it.
