Morning Mike, and welcome back!
I work in both Soton and Pompey and write from Pompey this morning. I have a sense of what promotion means to this footie mad city after so long. Congratulations!
Best, C.
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Thanks, Chris. Got home after midnight and it’s still sinking in.
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It was certainly a key game to have been at. It was tense enough at home following the text feed!
Really wish someone did the Portsmouth drone footage for us. What an impressive thing.
Remarkably we’re prosecuting two of our pitch invaders. Will be interesting to see what they did given that club footage shows our right wing back with a flare in his hand.
Fabulous day out in Crewe. Thoroughly professional and easy on the eye performance. McClean ought to have seen red but then the original offence also warranted a red so they were lucky to finish with 10 rather than 9. The win means we have recorded our highest ever EFL points total in our 1st season back. An unlikely win against Stockport would be a nice way to finish it off.
Not sure Arthur appreciated the “sign the contract” chants at the end but then he literally had no save to make in 100 minutes.
Elsewhere the excitement/tension grows.
Gunn rightly named man of the match which sums up our performance.
Happy to get away with a draw against a very useful Bristol City side, Gunn saved us from at least a 3-1 defeat.
Once again we weren’t helped by playing ten men for eighty five minutes!
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Always been embarrassed by the number of our previous keepers that have one player of the season awards, starting in my memory with Chris Woods and including pretty much every keeper since.
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Kevin Keelan deserved more than one!
Saw him in my first season & his last, 79/80. He still looked a quality keeper.
Didn’t get any more POTS because we were a better balanced team then, not so reliant on the goalkeeper.
So so defence, so so midfield & so so forward line!
Good to see Kevin Keenan mentioned. Before my birth when he played for us but noticeable that older fans still mention him now.
I was fascinated to see the EFL highlights of your game last night as the commentator fair roasted the Norwich performance. Interesting that the commentator on the extended EFL highlights didn’t repeat that but equally interesting to watch them. Your biggest issue remains the non-physical nature of your defending. Watching rather than intervening. Gunn had an excellent game but he faced a number of shots which he really ought not to have.
Equally interesting to note the lack of midfielders chasing back when you lost the ball, often literally none, and yet the focus here but not anywhere else remains on Barnes being the guy not doing a job. I watched those highlights in full and kept winding back to be clear on what I was seeing. I’d be more worried about the cheapness and carelessness of Sainz giving the ball away and launching opposition attacks. Let’s be clear Brizzle are a good team with a good young manager. They’re very much on the up but Sainz gifted them 3 attacks and their goal. He’s great attacking and facing the opposition goal but far too easy to pressure when facing his own goal.
Then there’s Barnes. Absolutely no doubt he lacks pace but is he really contributing as little as suggested here? Watch that video when Norwich attack; when Norwich had set pieces and when Norwich score. When Norwich have set pieces his positioning is repeatedly exemplary. He finds space constantly whether pulling away at corners or moving towards the goal line. At set pieces he’s constantly moving and moving players out of the way. Watch the Sara miss from the corner when the ball flies across the goal. Who is the player pulling a City defender away from the touchline to allow a flat low ball to the near post? Yup, it’s that bloke doing “nothing”. When Norwich equalise who is the guy in the middle who first plays the ball back and then drops off a defender into space leaving two of them chasing the Norwich attacker and neither knowing whose going to make the tackle. It’s a fraction of a second thing but real top level footballing intelligence. You have to watch the video a few times to see it but it’s there and it’s clearly deliberate. Similarly his balls out to both wings to give momentum to attacks were both quick witted and deceptively simple.
Thought it would then be interesting to watch the full length highlights of your last game where he was slagged off here and… well there it all is again. He’s giving you stuff and you can’t even see it.
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What you didn’t see was Barnes falling over nearly every time he received a pass or just trotting around to no effect. He also failed to get a couple of reasonable chances on target let alone score. A good player five years ago but just getting in the way of youngsters. Sara is far better in the number ten position.
Sara not only set up our goal with a gem of a pass to Sargent but linked up play constantly throughout the game with his wonderfully languid skills that are typical of Brazilian players.
Our defence is hopeless. Duffy like Barnes is well past retirement age and keeping several promising youngsters out of the team. If we’d a better owner than Delia we’d have clung on to Omobamidele. Gibson is marginally better than Duffy but takes ages to see a pass. Unfortunately we’ve signed Duffy up for two further years but on the brightside Gibson is out of contract this summer.
Behave. Clearly 12 minutes aren’t representative but, assuming those were the highlights, then he was right at the heart of everything good you did.
Go back and look specifically at the pass from Sara to Sargent. If you can’t see Barnes pivotal role in that then I’m not sure what you’re watching. He firstly lays the ball back and turns. That gives you attacking momentum and bodies going forward which Brizzle have to track. At the precise moment the ball falls to Sara Barnes then does something that only a player with that level of experience could know to do. Sargent is being tracked. He isn’t free and he even gestures to Sara to play the ball to your left wing rather than him. That gesture can be clearly seen at 6 minutes and 57 seconds on the video.
Stop the video at that point. Barnes has a player tight on him. He drops a second later. The player tracking Barnes is caught. It’s a fraction of a second thing but he can see Sargent running to his right and Barnes pulling away. He has to make a decision so he drops and goes with Sargent. The Brizzle defenders are instantly in trouble because the one who was following Sargent no longer knows if it’s him or the guy who has dropped off Barnes who is best placed to tackle and so they both hesitate and one ends up falling over the other. That momentary hesitation lets Sargent in and it’s 1-1. Now stop the video at 7:07 and who is it the 2 of them head towards to celebrate with? I think you can guess. Post match interview Sargent gives explicit credit to Barnes for the goal but you still can’t see it or just don’t want to.
EFL video on YouTube for anyone to look at. The above events are clear as day of you put your bias on the bin and watch as a neutral as I do. There are few greater footballing pleasures in life than watching a player who clearly won’t play at the highest level again using his brain to compensate for other deficiencies and yet you’re missing it week in week out.
We’ll have to disagree on that one.
Rowe on the right with Sara in the number ten role poses a far greater threat and fewer turnovers. It also adds greater pace in attack which is the killer in the championship.
Do we? I disagree. The evidence is in the video. Unless it’s been faked by AI it’s absolutely 100% irrefutable. There aren’t multiple truths here but even when I highlight stuff to the second you see something to be denied. The evidence is there for anyone to see. Interestingly, the more of the longer EFL videos you watch the more evident it becomes just how much he does that you decline to see or give credit for.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan boy. He was never an elite player even playing at elite level but he’s a classic example of an elder statesman journeyman able to offer something unique despite no longer possessing all the things which got him to the highest levels of the game.
There is having different opinions on stuff which is open to interpretation such as, for example, the penalty in the FA Cup semi. That’s fair enough. This isn’t that though.
Following yesterday’s F.A. Cup semi final snooze fest, we had a very entertaining game today, which Man. U must consider themselves very lucky to have won.
Full credit to Coventry who thought they’d prevailed in the final minute of extra time, ruled marginally offside, (Incorrectly, yet another VAR c**k up), and lost in the lottery of a penalty shootout.
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I’ve looked at the replay on Sky and all it shows is Barnes trotting around having no effect on the Bristol defenders. Sargent manages to latch on to a brilliant ball from Sara and hold off the two defenders who were marking him for most of the game.
You’re seeing guile from Barnes that just isn’t there. If you look you can see he’s not occupied anybody. Talk about biased.
The goal itself was offside which was my thought at the time and was surprised it stood and pleased there was no VAR.
Happy to post screen shots with timings and arrows showing the exact movements if it will help you understand and appreciate what you have before it is gone but really I’m just a little surprised that you can’t see what’s right there. Describing that as “trotting around having no effect” could only be done if you watched the video once and focused only on the pass and shot.
My coaching qualifications are years out of date although I do still coach but we were coaching strikers to do that 40 years ago and it’s the sort of thing highlighted by stills and arrows on both MOTD and Sky on a fairly regular basis. Drop and make your marker hesitate. Absolutely brilliant.
Interesting to watch it again this morning and see not only Sargent so unaware of what’s going on that he points to the wing indicating where he thinks the ball should go. He is not running expecting to get a pass, which of course is why his stride is off and he stumbles slightly, but also both he and Sara have failed to see that you have another runner blazing through at speed inside your left winger with absolutely no-one tracking the run. Noticeably the Sara pass is actually straight to Barnes not Sargent but the former lets it go because he can see everything - Sara, the winger, the runner, Sargent running and his marker dropping off and going with Sargent. The latter of course being the exact thing which means neither defender knows who is going for Sargent.
I don’t expect to change your mind here. We had Ian Rush for a season. Well past his best and his only goal was in the reserves. At the time loads of our fans slaughtered him for not adapting his game to the lower leagues. Nowadays several coaches still use the footage of his off the ball movements from that season and one clip in particular is a standard part of the FAW coaching courses.
The only thing Barnes managed to do was get the ball back to Sara and leave the pass from Sara to Sargent. The defenders were always concentrating on Sargent as they can see he is the danger.
I admire the persistence but here’s the clear evidence that the defenders were absolutely not “… always concentrating on Sargent”. The player facing Barnes here is number 16, Dickie. He’s the player who, when Barnes drops, is a fraction late to see the danger; goes with Barnes for a fraction and then chases after Sargent only to confuse the guy already tracking him such that when they realise one had to get a foot in they end up in a heap together. You’ll note here that Dickie is focused on the ball and Barnes not Sargent.
