Saturday's defeat to Middlesbrough seems to have affected a portion of our supporters in a curious way, despite the fact that Mowbray's side now sit atop the Championship table, have the best goal difference of any team in the league, and were only saved the indignity of us being the team to stop their run of six consecutive away wins by the width of a crossbar, some people are far from happy.
Perhaps it's a byproduct of the start we have made, that fans arrived at Selhurst just expecting another team of northern upstarts to be dispatched comfortably by the boys. People could be seen with looks of bewilderment plastered across their faces when the final whistle sounded, memories of stoppage time fight backs and Glenn Murray supersub appearances a mere flicker of a memory in their angered heads.
This in itself is a measure of how far Dougie Freedman has taken the club in his short reign in charge, and goes some way to showing that the "disease" he spoke of in his column this week is finally starting to relent in supporters minds. I have no doubt that last season we would have been dead and buried in that game before the half-time whistle had even sounded, I shudder to think of the atrocities that could have occurred in Saturday's game if the team we put out had George Burley in charge of it, although I would assume we'd have conceded at least one goal in the opening 12 minutes before submitting to a humiliating defeat and thanking Boro for the privilege of playing them when they boarded their team coach.
As it was, we competed well for large spells of the game, before conceding a goal to the extremely dangerous Marvin Emnes who was left free at the back post for the first time all afternoon and took his opportunity with aplomb, no complaints from me on that front.
There was no doubting the desire from the boys to get back into the game after the goal, with sustained pressure coming close to paying off on two occasions late on, once from Jermaine Easter's strike which rattled the bar and the second coming in the shape of a Murray header which he couldn't get over enough to get on target.
Wilf, who was introduced straight after the goal, took to his task with real commitment and caused the Boro defence a multitude of problems, in particular Joe Bennett, who was sent off after pulling Zaha back when he got past him with 15 minutes to go. There were one or two times when Wilf would have been better advised to pass rather than shoot when he got to the byline, but as whole, he looked our most threatening player once he came on.
The main point I feel it in necessary to get across when looking at Saturday's result is that, had Easter's shot been two inches lower the inquest into the performance would be nowhere near as fervent, it would be viewed as another solid point, which we would have battled hard for and got our rewards for the pressure late on.
Instead, certain voices are clambering for reasons that we can attribute the defeat to, something I don't remember happening straight after Coventry at home when we performed in almost exactly the same way, but through a mixture of a bit of luck and some tricky wing play from the aforementioned Zaha, we managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Don't get me wrong, losing hurts, but the manner of it was hardly as damaging this Saturday as it has been so often in the last few months.
We face Boro again in three days, and with both sides liable to make some changes to the starting XI's, I see no reason why we can't get back to winning ways as fast as have fallen out of them. With chances such as Paddy McCarthy's first half header going in, there would have been no reason to believe that we couldn't have gone on to secure all three points yesterday afternoon, and with Boro either making two extremely long journeys up and down the country or staying in a hotel in between our two games with them there is no doubting they will almost certainly not be at their most settled by the time our game kicks off on Tuesday evening.
Hopefully, these two league defeats on the spin are no more than a blip and we can clear our heads sufficiently in the hours before our next game to approach Tuesday night with the same enthusiasm and verve that we have done on our previous two outings in the League Cup, predictions on the result aside, I am just hopeful that we don't let last season's mentality creep back into our minds after two unlucky defeats, these are the times Freedman will have to work hard to keep the "disease" from reappearing, and I have the utmost faith in his medicinal skills.
Until next time.
No comments:
Post a Comment