The team finally feels like it is balanced. However.......

some of the passing in the first 30 minutes against Wigan was as bad as anything we have produced in the last two seasons and we simply will not get away with giving the ball away like that against the likes of Derby, Brentford and Stoke.

Perhaps we chose a good game to be sloppy in because Wigan had very little attacking threat and in the second half we happy with a point but we need to be a lot sharper on Wednesday. It wouldn't be the same if Jim wasn't "concerned" about something but i do worry that managers who are tactically switched on will realise that if you press our defenders and midfielders high up the pitch then we still have a tendancy to play sloppy passes. We passed it straight to them about 40 yards from our own goal on about half a dozen occasions in the first half on Saturday. Buendia in particular still needs to learn when not to try and play a killer pass and I would be tempted to play Vrancic ahead of either him or Cantwell on Wednesday. The flipside to this high risk approach is that if/when we do manage to beat the press then there is lot of space for us to exploit going forward
, Stiepermann and Pukki make some great runs and we do look quite dangerous, even on saturday when we weren't great we had about 5 situations where with a better final pass we should have scored.

Posted By: Jim, Oct 1, 10:34:13