SL wrote:I enjoyed my weekend away but certainly not the game. It was very frustrating to watch.
Sam Allardyce did a tactical job on us yesterday imo. Hes not stupid. Surely hes studied why we have been so good away from home this season and condeded 0 goals on the road until yesterday.
If he watched the Reading away game he would have seen a team sitting deep, inviting pressure and then punishing Reading on the break with quick, incisive passing and movement.
Yesterday we werent allowed to do that at all. Quite the opposite.
Despite being at home Newcastle sat deep, invited pressure and allowed us to have the ball. As we have seen at home this season, when teams do that to us we struggle to unlock them.
IMO yesterday was like watching a frustrating home match. Loads of posession, no creative ideas and everytime the opposition got into our box they seemed to score.
The defensive errors were awful. Neil shouldnt have tried running the ball out of defense like Pele for the first goal and Anton shouldnt have allowed someone like Viduka to get across the front of him so easily. As for the 2nd goal, was Bowyer running backwards?
We missed Bellamy big time imo. Carlton Cole is simply useless.
Fingers crossed we have a bit more creativity when Ljungberg & Parker are up to full speed.
I disagree with the highlighted bit. The Newcastle defence spent the entire 1st half playing such a high line that had we had a fast striker on to feed off the flicks that both Ashton and Cole were winning we would have had about 5 one on ones. The problem was that we had 2 players that basically play the same way so therefore we couldn't capitalise on it.
