His subs on this occasion seemed logical to me to be quite honest. I’m not saying they turned the game but made sense at the time.
I thought first off the selection was wrong. McGuinness and Baptiste had just played 90 together at Blackburn in a good away win and a good away performance conceding only a worldy. I can appreciate the desire to restore Tanganga there but given the absence of , and Tanganga having played 22 times at right back for Spurs, he should have started there and it would have killed most of their offense down that side. Baptiste is 1.91m and McGuinness 1.94m, they were more qualified than Japh, at 1.84m, to deal with their big lump up front anyway.
I also thought 4-4-2 is too open to play away from home but with BBD only just arrived, Oné and Chong injured, not easy to fashion a proper 4-2-3-1 this week.
It took the first half and then uncharacteristically he made two changes as early as half time.
He switched to 3-5-1-1. In came Shackleton at RWB where he probably thought it would ask too much of Donovan defensively and in came Phillips for Bamford who, assist aside, had drifted out of the game. I understood this. Could Doherty have come in? Maybe or perhaps wing back is asking a lot of a 34 year old building up match action?
As the game went on he brought on Riedewald to give us more solidity given Rothwell’s passing game was off anyway. He then decided to give the defence more natural balance and brought on Norrington-Davies on the left hoping that would add a player who could carry the ball forward, and on a few occasions he did.
With Cannon ploughing a lone furrow, it was only a matter of time until her introduced Brereton-Diaz.
Now it doesn’t explain why we kept turning the ball over through unforced errors and one of our most popular players, O’Hare, did that frequently, but I sidnt sit there thinking “why’s he done that?”.
That’s just my 2 cents anyway.
