Malcolm Dawson writes…..anyone who thought that the euphoria of last weekend was the precursor to a change of fortune and a rapid rise up the table would have been brought back down to earth by today’s performance. Sure, just as we had seen in the first half of the West Ham game there were signs of positive attacking intent and we could have been two nil up, but just like in the Leicester and Norwich games our defensive frailties were evident. We look like a team that will always concede more than we score. Big Sam is apparently looking to address this but his defensive options are limited and injuries to O’Shea and Kaboul limited him still further. Already it seems that once again our best chance of staying up is the fact that there are other teams, The Mags, Villa and Bournemouth who are equally bad. Cold comfort perhaps. In his post match e-mail the manager struggles to find the positives. Let’s hope he has some answers.
Dear Colin,
We’ve thrown away an opportunity to feel good this weekend. We went behind when we really shouldn’t have done, clawed our way to 2-2 and then, for me, that’s when we should have been at least coming off with a point today.
If Everton had scored a wonder goal from somewhere then you can say ‘there’s not a lot we can do about that, but the last four goals were all stoppable by us and there was nothing brilliant about Everton’s play.
We seemed to get carried away by the euphoria of getting the equaliser and we had really good opportunities to get 3-2 up, but instead of taking one we left the back door open for Everton to make it look like an easy win.
That’s a lack of understanding of where you’re playing and who you’re playing against. You’ve got to keep emotional control and you play at this level via the intelligence you’ve got – ability is all well and good, but if you don’t have the intelligence with it at this level, you lose control.
It’s a great shame, because at 2-2 it was looking comfortable for us and we should have protected that.
Thanks for your support,
Sam Allardyce
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2 new full backs and 2 new centre halves are needed quickly,,,,the youngsters in the reserves could play better than what we had out at Everton.Why oh why was wes brown given another years contract,he is finished as a premier league player,if he ever was one! I like Cattermole,but he needs good players around him for him to be affective,he wins the ball but there is no-one for him to give it to without it coming straight back at us.We have 3 or 4 good players,the rest are just not good enough.There is a lot of driftwood in this team and needs to be off loaded down the leagues as soon as possible! Give 1 or 2 of the young uns a game,they cant do any worse than whats already playing. Sam knows what is needed,but its a long way before the transfer window opens again in January,we may be out of touch by then.Looking at this team maybe we should go down and let Sam build a new team,but I don’t want that and hope we survive and then have Sam or whoever build us a decent team……So lets all pray for a miracle..AGAIN!
Is Ron Vlaar a free agent? If he is, he needs to be signed up.
The three at the back allowed us to attack and going forward we looked dangerous, they scored against the run of play it seemed we thd understood our limitations and fought hard to equalise. Then we threw caution to the wind and kept getting hit on the counter attack. The personell in defence seemed unsuited to the formation and Wes Brown was badly exposed and found out but therexwas enough to take heart from, learn move forward and improve