My flight out here to Singapore left me suitably jet-lagged to watch the match on ESPN, and I was v. happy, especially in the first half. We showed more urgency and hints of the creative cutting edge we have wanted. Kewell and Garcia together were very exciting - you didn't know what they were going to do, but you were sure it would be exciting.
Djimi looked confident when he came on, and we no longer seem "thin" on the bench to me. What with the nice opportunities at the end from Milan and Cisse, it was a nice game. Whoever the commentator was, he needed to put down his crack pipe and stop saying that Dudek should have caught everything instead of blocking some of those shots away.
The defense looked confident at everything with perhaps the exception of corners, Hamann was anonymous (but not in too negative a way, if you know what I mean) and Cisse might have been a little tentative on Stevie G's goal, but other than that no quibbles.
Luis Garcia's miss was so bad that I laughed, but just before the first goal Kewell about broke the defender's leg with a volley, and Hyppia's bullet header rocked Hoult back on his heels. What struck me most, however, even before the goal, was the way Finnan was trapping long passes. He stopped them dead and convenient, right in front of himself, every time. That gave him an edge in disposing of it quickly or running with it, as he didn't have to wait for it to stop bobbling around. It was a key to his goal, and his passing was very neat because of it as well. Since he and Harry were getting a lot of longr passes, it really improved our speed of attack that they could both kill the long passes out of the air and the start the attack at speed.
Anyway, we could have scored more, but it was only WBA. Roll on Wednesday!
