We defended really well. Less worried when Robbo came on but slightly concerned that Rice overpowered Fabinho and Hendo at the same time.
I'm chuffed with the win, but, seriously, some of our defending was horrific. The Gomez challenge to give away a pen was really poor, but the sequence that led to Milly's diving saving block was typical of our season - firstly Jones (I think) made a really poor attempt to close down their CB getting no where near the passing lane to their fullback taking himself right out of the game, the FB tonks a diagonal which Trent misjudges allowing it to go over his head poorly, he closes down his man only to get too close, then tries to push him off the ball because he couldn't be bothered to track him properly (a common theme for both him and Gomez this season), Fabinho makes a pretty poor half clearance, but the ball falls kindly to their attacker who feeds into Soucek who is only stopped from a simple tap-in by brilliant defending from Milner. To cap it all off, they had a completely free header from the resulting corner which they fucked up. The whole passage of play was a defensive cluster-fuck. There's no getting around it. If we have our sights set on mid-table, then, yeah, it can happen at the end of a game when you're tired. But fuck me if our standards have dropped so low so quickly. Trent needs a fucking rocket up his arse. We need squad players that can put in a shift, are not labouriously slow and are solid defensively, not a load of potentially magnificent kids who are either too naive, too physically weak, too unbalanced (good going forward, not so great the other way), permanently injured or just plain lazy.
Sorry, didn't mean to get so negative, but I really can't see us sustaining any form this season with this level of defending. At least Virg and Fab have realised they're not playing walking football. If they could let TAA know, that would be great.
