DonnieAndMooie wrote:
I avoided looking at this forum or twitter during the match because I could imagine what it was going to be like. Here's my assessment of tonight...
This is not a surprise. If any of you are shocked by this result or performance, you need to give your head a wobble. We've been useless away from home all season. We've been awful in virtually every big game under MW (Mansfield away being the only exception). And there's an obvious pattern that when we concede the first goal, we absolutely crumble.
When Max had his chance in the opening minutes, I started to think maybe we had actually turned up tonight. Maybe I should have realised when he didn't score that it was never going to be our night. He never misses those. In a blink of an eye we were behind and from that point out we'd got ourselves stuck in a hole and couldn't get out of it. We couldn't get the ball off of them, and when we did, we couldn't keep it. There were some extremely bizarre tactics, as we decided we would be better to sit off them and invite pressure rather than press them high which is what we're good at. That had to be an instruction from the manager, and questions must be asked about him. On the lack of pressing, their goalkeeper is what Big Fil Marschall thinks he is. If we've got half a brain cell we'd try and sign him in the summer.
All of a sudden we were under a swarm of pressure that we just couldn't escape. As we've seen so many times before with this group of players, when the pressure is on, they freeze. They don't know what to do. In the first half we resorted to long balls up to nobody, which was almost identical to what happened against Wycombe 2 years ago. At the start of the second half we started making some passes and were slowly building our way back into the game and the game hinges on one moment. Harrison goes through on goal and curls it wide of the post. If he scores that, the last half an hour or so is very different. He misses and in a blink of an eye it's 3. Game over. And to be honest it's an absolute miracle it was only 3. Could have and probably should have been 6 or 7.
Saturday night may as well be a friendly game (it's about time Lewie had another testimonial, isn't it?). There's just absolutely no chance we can turn this around. We will almost certainly play much better than tonight, and we'll probably win the game. We may even score 3 or 4 goals, I wouldn't put it past us. But there is absolutely no way in hell that we keep a clean sheet. It's just not happening. I'll still go, and no doubt if we get an early goal I'll start to get my hopes up, but in our heart of hearts all of us know that we blew this tie tonight.
After 20 years, I've finally accepted one thing tonight - we will never, ever win the playoffs.
Great assessment of the game. Whilst it is easy just to say we were shit and got battered, those two misses before their 1st and 3rd goal were massive. We need to be taking those chances.
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