Well, that one was a tough watch wasn’t it?\u00a0 \u00a0After the battling performance that earned us three points on Saturday against Stoke, Tuesday night saw us give up without a fight at Stoke, slipping to a 3-0 defeat that could easily have been more given the complete domination of the home side.<\/p>\n
Conceding 59% possession, 22 shots at goal, three goals, a red card and being out passed by Stoke sums up the miserable level of the performance that has to be the low point of the Russell Martin era to date.<\/p>\n
There will be much soul searching required in SA1 over the next few days with more than one player needing to take a hard look at their part in the performance on a night where the only positive has to be that the score was kept to three.<\/p>\n
As has become the norm after recent games though, we reflect back the day after – win, lose or draw –\u00a0 and wonder what things we can take from the game, so take a deep breath and these are five things we took from that proverbial “Cold Tuesday night in Stoke”<\/p>\n
1. Square pegs and round holes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>We are getting to the habit of claiming tactical genius when we win games but the longer the season has gone on the more obvious it becomes that square pegs and round holes cause our problems.\u00a0 Korey Smith is not an attacking midfielder and Hannes Wolf is not a wing back are two good examples.\u00a0 It may work in some games but I fear that it will fail more than it succeeds.<\/p>\n 2. What was our transfer window about?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>I’ll say it now in that I do not get the signing of Finley Burns.\u00a0 When we bought him in I assumed it was to give him game time but even with a suspension to Ryan Manning and an injury to Kyle Naughton he didn’t see any game time.\u00a0 \u00a0If he was to play then the move makes sense but to not have him playing just seems like a move for the sake of it.<\/p>\n 3. Tiredness should not be a factor?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>I get that we are playing Saturday\/Tuesday at the moment due to the postponements of games around Christmas time but this is an issue for pretty much every other side in the division.\u00a0 We may not necessarily have the strength in depth of every team in this division but our fitness appears to have been a concern all season and doesn’t seem to be changing.<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0 No more excuses, actions speak louder than words.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Little doubt over the next few days we will hear the same trodden out lines from key members of the squad.\u00a0 \u00a0“let ourselves down”, “Need to bounce back on Sunday” and “The fans deserved better” will be lines we hear but we do hear them more often recently than we would like.\u00a0 \u00a0Are we learning from the mistakes that we are making?\u00a0 You would like to think so but it doesn’t always appear that way.<\/p>\n 5. Is our formation just wrong?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Is it time to move towards a more traditional back four to accommodate the players we have?\u00a0 \u00a0We have a good defence in terms of clean sheets but if we had Christie\/Manning as full backs with two central defenders it would allow for a better midfield formation in front.\u00a0 \u00a0 Fulton, Grimes, Smith last night just suggested minimal creativity within a key area of the pitch.\u00a0 A flat back four allows Downes to move into midfield (presumably next to Grimes) and frees up two from Wolf\/Ntcham\/Paterson a little to support a front two of largely Piroe and Obafemi.\u00a0 \u00a0 Would it make a difference?\u00a0 It couldn’t be any worse than last night!<\/p>\n So that is our five takeaways and thoughts from last night – a tough game to watch but itrs Bristol City next – the performance simply has to be significantly better!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, that one was a tough watch wasn’t it?\u00a0 \u00a0After the battling performance that earned us three points on Saturday against Stoke, Tuesday night saw us give up without a fight at Stoke, slipping to a 3-0 defeat that could easily have been more given the complete domination of the home side. Conceding 59% possession, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,49,203],"tags":[552,608],"class_list":["post-54623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-team","category-news","category-opinion","tag-stoke-city","tag-the-2021-22-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}