Wednesday’s Squabbling Kids Lose Their Heads

I said on 60 minutes as we started to turn on the pressure on Brentford, that we deserve absolutely nothing from this game, and I stand by that now. What a woeful, pathetic, spineless display. In all my years, I have never felt absused by my football team. On a Tuesday night after once again tracking over the snake pass from Manchester, it reached this territory. After a pathetic showing from our childlike coaching staff on the sidelines, we deserved, and needed, to be taught a lesson.

First off the chopping and changing of positions is getting us no where. Bannan on the left, a monkey could see that that doesn’t work. After an upturn in form when being played in the middle after an injury to Lee, this has never been more obvious. He offered absolutely nothing, and we actually lost his ability to control a game from our central midfield positions.

Forestieri was our only spark and deserved his goal. However this was more for work rate than ability. He simply doesn’t have the chance to show his ability in a striker position. He doesn’t get on the ball enough. When he does get the ball, there aren’t any more lines to break through, as he is in the line highest up already. He usually has his back to goal with defenders tight on him, so he is looking to link up play with little touches here and there. In a wide position he is able to run at defenders, get on the ball over and over, and play himself into the game.

Now there is the game itself. From the video it was definitely a penalty. From the stands I thought it probably a penalty, but I thought the referee was reasonable in thinking that Fernando had gone to ground too easily. It looked like he wasn’t completely past Dean, and that he had gone down quite easily. In conclusion the referee was reasonable in thinking it was not a penalty from his position at the time. There was a few other 50/50s. The decision he made to book Foresiteri after Forestieri had been fouled was a genuinely bad decision but the rest were 50/50s. I don’t think it was a foul on Sasso in the lead up to the corner.

The coaches on the bench jumped on the hype from the crowd, as they were looking to draw attention away from how badly they were playing. There needed an excuse at half time so they didn’t have to admit they were playing terribly badly. They totally lost their heads, Carlos being the major culprit of this. Against a team we should be comfortable enough to breeze past regardless of refereeing decisions, I expected our gaffer to show more composure, more class than he did.

Other than the theories about his personality that this draws me to, in terms of his lack of composure, I think this allowed the team to get caught up in the emotions and feel sorry for themselves. You could see their concentration drop and you could see half of them still claiming for past decisions when the second goal went in. At that point the game was out of Wednesday`s reach. Whatever the referee had done, and I don’t think he had done that terribly, you cannot loose your head against a team that you should comfortably beat.

It was really quite sad that our coaching staff felt the need to completely loose their heads. I honestly think they were looking for an excuse so they didn’t have to admit we were playing badly, and we were set up wrong. I think Carlos along with Andy Rhodes and Joao Mario Oliveria need a good hard look at themselves. We cannot be allowed to think that we lost that game because of poor refereeing decisions.