Saturday’s game versus Doncaster Rovers stretched our disappointing run of home form to four games without a win. Securing just four points from those four games could be the run of form that costs us an automatic promotion spot.
As a season ticket holder, I can tell you that the most frustrating thing about these disappointing results is not the experience of watching the game itself. The most frustrating part comes when you receive the email from Sam Allardyce where he attempts to explain what went wrong.I haven’t seen his explanation for the fiasco of Saturday afternoon, so I’m going to explain what I think went wrong and then see if he agrees with me. I’m going to guess that he won’t.
The problems, as I see them, all boil down to decision making, both on and off the pitch.
Take, for example, the decision to constantly play long balls to Carlton Cole in the hope that he’ll be able to head it down and bring other attacking players into the game. I can only assume that this is a tactic specifically employed by Allardyce.
We knew that we were in for a certain amount of this style of play when Allardyce was appointed. I was fine with that at first, because it’s a tactic that he’d employed with success at previous clubs. However, with the final stretch of the season approaching us, I would have expected Allardyce to have realised by now, with the years of experience he has behind him that Carlton is more or less useless employed as a target man in this way.
Carlton can’t (or won’t) jump. More often than not he is beaten in the air by defenders and our midfield has not been competitive enough lately to win the second ball. Carlton is far more effective when the ball is played to his feet and yet we rarely see this happen.
I was confident at the start of the season that Carlton would be extremely effective playing at this level. He has the ability to frighten defenders if he gets the right kind of service. The tactics employed by Big Sam mean that Carlton rarely gets to demonstrate his true strengths.
Poor decisions can cost matches. Think about the goals we conceded against Doncaster and Watford. Could our defence have cleared their lines more effectively than they did leading up to these goals? I believe so.
They are happy to knock long balls forward when they’re under no pressure to do so. Why are they seemingly unable to clear the ball in a similar fashion when under a little pressure? Too often we see our defence looking to pass their way out from the back when the more sensible option actually would be to hit a long pass to relieve pressure.
Poor decisions can seriously limit goal scoring opportunities. Take Mark Noble. Mark is arguably our player of the season so far. He’s been great. But still, there are areas of his play where his decision making lets him down. He never seems to decide straight away what he’s going to do when he’s in possession.
Too often you see promising attacking opportunities stall because the player in possession (and I’m not just talking about Mark Noble) needs four or five touches of the ball before they’ve decided what pass to play. A slow and sensible approach is all well and good if you’re firmly in control of the game, but we haven’t been in control lately. We’ve been crying out for some decisive and creative play from the midfield, but there has been none.
The teams we’re playing against at home often have no real desire to come out and beat us. To beat them, all we should really need to do is play football. Proper football, with the ball on the ground and just keep passing. But we struggle to break them down. At the moment, with a combination of long ball tactics and pedestrian midfield play, we are playing right into the hands of teams that just want to sit back and take a point from us.
I think what I found the most inexplicable about the match on Saturday was the way the game transformed after we went ahead. For the first fifteen minutes we were magnificent. A goal disallowed after 11 seconds, Carlton hit the bar, we were all over them. Then came the goal, and shortly after Vaz Te left the field with an injury and the whole game changed.
This was another example of poor decision making, this time on the part of Sam Allardyce. Vaz Te, with his power and pace, was causing the Doncaster defence countless problems. He is skilled with the ball at his feet and their full back couldn’t handle him. Then poor Sam Baldock comes on and is expected to do the same job, which he is just not capable of doing.
Again, I like Baldock. But he is a striker. He doesn’t have the ability to power past defenders like Vaz Te does. It was indescribably frustrating to see him trying to make an impact on the game while playing in a position that he is clearly not comfortable with.
We had Danny Collins on the bench at that point. It would surely have been simple to replace Vaz Te with Collins and push Matt Taylor into his preferred left midfield position? Instead we are back to our old ways of putting square pegs in round holes. I think we saw enough of that with Zola and Grant.
With each substitution we looked less and less likely to score a second goal. Why replace Lansbury with O’Neil if you are not going to get O’Neil involved in the game? Why replace Nolan with Collins when Nolan (despite what we might say about his all round contribution to the team) is one of the few players in the team who is capable of sticking away a chance when he gets one?
The decisions in recent weeks have been poor and have left so many of us feeling frustrated and concerned for our chances of gaining automatic promotion. I, for one, would not rate our chances too highly if it came to the playoffs.
I am left with one crucial decision to make myself. Do I renew my season ticket, or not? I probably will. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
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