HorsforthRam

Fair gif mate, I quoted a post and it didn’t come across, just my sentence 🙏🏽🤷🏽‍♂️🤣

They knew what they had to do before last night and before Northampton, but didn’t do it. 

Not trawled through all the matchthread (gave up around p40) but I think last night was a game that has summed up our season.
Take both those early chances and we would have been celebrating another "get the job done" win and admiring a disciplined second half defensive performance. 
But we all know to score two, we need six chances, not just two or three.
To create six chances, we need the football to flow. Ward makes that happen in recent games. He's injured, so we replace that role with Collins, playing out of position.  He's a striker, not a midfielder. We leave Tommo on the bench, who would have been the natural link between our deep sitting midfield two and the attack, would have been available for the pass from Wilson and Sibley (who were both desperately looking for feet to play into and finding no-one there) and who can press and harry just as well as Collins.
Warne needed to select either Washington or Collins, not both, and play an attacking midfielder. If he doesn't rate Thommo, he could have put Hourihane in there. 
He didn’t,  and we faltered. I wish Warne would stop trying to create new systems and patterns and just do the simple stuff sometimes. 
Footballers are a bit simple too. They play instinctively in patterns that are ingrained from an early age.
Take them out of their natural positions, play them in different systems and they have to think more quickly in order to be successful.  It fails more than it works. 
Add in the factor that our forwards aren't world beaters, we need to be giving them all the help we can to play their natural games. 
I think we were one player choice away from that routine win last night. So disappointing. 
 

Hardly battered. They scored an early penalty and hit us on the counter in the 2nd half.
We still had 10 shots in that game (5 on target), with their keeper making some excellent saves. Also, Collins and Mendez-Laing both had goals ruled out for offside.

I think it boils down to two things....possibly three:
Whether you think the team is better than its sum parts.......that's what good managers achieve and many don't believe PW hasn't achieved that, despite us being in 2nd place.
Is the football good to watch?........I see a lot of snarking at those who are openly critical of the style of play but very few who openly think it's great.
But, I get your point. I'm not sure how it works..... but you can enjoy the season and the results without particularly enjoying the football itself. I'm sort of in that position and reasonably confident we'll hold on to 2nd place.
The other possibility is that we get very high quality football pumped into our living rooms for the rest of the week and unrealistically expect our squad to play error-free in the same manner. I find Man City quite boring to watch on occasions but the game against Real Madrid was a thriller. City made nearly 700 passes with over 90% completion and their outfield players only played 10 long balls. Last night we made 375 passes with less than 70% completion with 60 long balls by outfield players. 
Mrs Bat said to me this morning "I know we've got season tickets again and we may get promoted but I can't stand another season of this sh*t"
That's where a lot of people are I'm afraid.

We have had multiple seasons of below moderate expectations ... even by the madness of the elite english  football world our recent history has been a dreadful downward spiral of a story .
Since the club was saved from the abyss we are making giant strides of progress behind the scenes with acadamy , corporate and communication being keystones . 
The disallusionment comes from the regular dire , just plain awful, performances of the first team .
Yes we are still 2nd 
Yes we can still get promotion via autos or playoffs 
With a squad so highly rated by many outside of the club , we ought to at least turn it on occasionally and take a comfortable victory .
Every game is on a knifeedge . 
The head coach will trot out how dangerous a team Leyton Orient / Cambridge and Carlisle are and that no team will come and get their bellies tickled . 
Ffs just thump them all 4.0 and hope posh and bolton dont match our results .   We need at least 1 big win as the precious goal difference advantage has almost vanished too.
How many times have we royally screwed up this seaaon when in a great position to really take an advantage ? 
Ad nauseum over the last quarter of a century ....
There is still time to get glory in 2024 .  
But that time is running out ..
 
From a fan who is teetering on the edge of losing the plot . 
 
 

Slept on it… now I feel even worse 😂🤣😂🤣 terrible 

NML, CBT, Collins were all poor, Washington looks like he won a competition to be a footballer.
If Washington won, CBT must've come 2nd.

Remember when you used to practice keepy uppies and you were getting close to your record and then the ball started to drift away and you were reaching for it to try and get the record breaking touch? That’s Derby after three passes

Remember when you used to practice keepy uppies and you were getting close to your record and then the ball started to drift away and you were reaching for it to try and get the record breaking touch? That’s Derby after three passes

Warne talks of halves of football and not wasting one. Well, we didn’t waste one, we wasted two. Love to know what the emphasis of the halftime team talk was. 

Remember when you used to practice keepy uppies and you were getting close to your record and then the ball started to drift away and you were reaching for it to try and get the record breaking touch? That’s Derby after three passes

Don’t think any of the subs strengthened us.
Waghorn used to be a good, aggressive player but now he’s just an aggressive player. He commits fouls hoping not to be seen despite the fact they are about as inconspicuous as a tiger in a nunnery.

Yes, Wycombe played much better stuff than I'd expected...some of their passges of plays were quite neat & opened us up easily. Also didnt think they resorted much to dark arts, it was a fair contest throughout. Their lad up top (Kone) looked a handful, add a bit of end product & he'll be playing at a much higher level.
It would have been difficult for a neutral to work out who was the team in 2nd & who was the team in 15th. Particularly galling given the difference in rest since last game & what was on the line for us. Was very disappointed with our approach, the ball seemed to be a hot potato at times, sensed a lack of urgency (Wildsmith taking ages over restarts) & the decision making was poor. Corners for instance...I get their keeper had a howler on Sunday but did every corner taker have to try & score directly!? Washington also seemed very ponderous on the break, the only exception being his ball to CBT who could have taken a touch & should have scored.
The side looked disjointed with Washingtoj & Collins up top..the latter was anonymous throughout and think we'd have been better served putting in Thompson as an extra midfielder to dominate territory & inject some creativity. Credit to Adams & Korey Smith who played well all night & stopped us being overrun.
Onto Orient & now needing favours from others. If I see Sonny Bradley in that starting line up, Im going to go spare. Dont even think about it Warne.

Warne talks of halves of football and not wasting one. Well, we didn’t waste one, we wasted two. Love to know what the emphasis of the halftime team talk was. 

Warne talks of halves of football and not wasting one. Well, we didn’t waste one, we wasted two. Love to know what the emphasis of the halftime team talk was. 

Completely exposed our one dimensional way of playing, if getting it wide and chucking it in the box doesn't work we really have no clue.
NML, CBT, Collins were all poor, Washington looks like he won a competition to be a footballer.
Smith had a good game, as did Sibley and Wildsmith.
Warnes in game management poor as well, too slow to make changes in the second half and even when they did come he didnt do enough. Looked too scared to lose the point to actually go for it.
Its another game in this season thats a missed opportunity, and another game they bored me to tears.

I was one of many who advocated bringing Hourihane on if we were drawing after 70 mins. But a cursory glance at Wycombe’s chances late on shows that his head is now in the departure lounge: he was almost single-handedly responsible for a Wycombe goal on more than one occasion, dawdling around defensively like Tom Lawrence in one of his sulks.

Sorry to say the safest place for him now is Villa Park. Otherwise he might enter the annals of our club’s history of end-of-season near misses 

I don’t think many of us were “stunned” especially with the result. I reckon most people thought it would be an ugly (actually Wycombe played better football than I expected) and difficult game that we’d probably have enough to win but the result wasn’t a shock. We’re (well me anyway) not stunned, just bitterly disappointed at such an inept and disjointed performance. Yes we had some great chances early on but these were largely down to breakaways aided by some poor defending. Once those opportunities had gone I don’t recall many occasions when we really looked liked scoring or putting together any sort of prolonged passage of play. It was all too frantic which I put down to tactics, formation and players individual performances.
I don’t think either Bolton or Posh will win all of their remaining games but the question is, can we? I see Orient being a difficult game that’ll well probably just scrape over the line in. No game is easy but we probably couldn’t have asked for a much easier final game. Based on our performances against Wycombe and Northampton, the Cambridge game worries me a lot. 

NML hasn't scored since Exeter away, 12 games, or assisted since Bristol Rovers away, 6 games.
Looks like he's ran out of steam, the same as last season, but with CBT not getting going there's little alternative tbh. Clearly CBT is a confidence player, and following that miss he was a waste of a shirt, along with Washington and Collins, which surprised me re Collins, very quiet, but have no time for Washington,  he's been poor all season.

He should have stroked it across the box, not fizzed it at 90mph. Washington bottled it, like he did the chance he had against Blackpool the other week. 

I was there last night and my god it was a hard watch. The constant Wildsmith to Nelson, Nelson to Wilson followed by the ball being lumped up the line invariably to a Wycombe player made my eyes bleed. A lot of people on here blaming CBT for the early miss but Washington was clean through and should have buried that himself. On the extremely rare occasions where we kept the ball on the deck we cut through them but of course that’s not the Warne way so it was back to lumping it. Not one player looked on it last night just like at Northampton. 
It is just so dispiriting to see us floundering in a match like that at such a crucial stage of the season. 

I agree the ball should have been better but it was still an absolutely shocking miss.

I half expected that and, I’m glad we didn’t lose.  I was nowhere near as nervous through the game as I was against Pompey because while we didn’t look like winning, we didn’t look like losing either.  That said the performance was not where it needs to be.  Again, too many off days at the same time.  Abject is probably a good description. 
If CBT’s chance goes in, we would probably have gone on to win comfortably but I think that affected not just him but the team too.  And NML at least has to make the keeper make a save.  I have some sympathy with Washington’s chance as the ball was bouncing and difficult to control.
My glass half full position (and helped by sleeping on it) is this happens, even to Liverpool!!  When we slipped up at Northampton, no-one else took advantage.  I had this as a draw and Pompey as a defeat, so 1 point up.  I think Pompey will beat Bolton win both promotion and the league, that’s come at a good time for us.  Posh will slip up in the next 5 and away to Oxford on Saturday isn’t easy.
3 wins, and I believe we can do it 🐏.

Not sure how adding Bradley helps in any logical way.
Our problems are in attack. We have a selection of forwards who either aren’t fully fit or otherwise just aren’t good enough.
Smith and Adams battled manfully in midfield but they desperately need a third player they can rely upon. Ward provided that briefly. Bird’s return would help massively.
We have the version of James Collins who runs around a lot without being creative and Washington who gets behind defences and then….nothing.
NML looks cursed. I have never seen a player kick the ball into touch as often.
We know CBT can be good, but does he?
What surprised me last night was our willingness to pump the ball in the air again, letting Wildsmith take long free kicks when creativity was needed. I hope that they will practice in training the slick first time passing which can produce the three wins we need.