Thoughts on last night

All in all down to earth with a bit of a bump. I was slightly deflated as soon as I saw the team sheet as my immediate gut reactions was "thats not a great team."

Mitigating factors:

1. Spurs are a very good team. Top 6 prem material and much better than anything we will face next season.

2. It was only a friendly.

3. We still have Kennedy, Lupoli and Bell to come in plus whatever new striker we manage to get. Plus several players were clearly not up to full fitness.

Thoughts:

1. Stefanovic was worryingly poor. i thought he looked great for the first 15 minutes then came that own goal and it went downhill after that. Their third goal was rank bad defending. hopefully its just lack of match fitness and he will still be a good player for us at champ level. Have to question why he was allowed not to go on the sweden tour though.

2. As soon as Bertie went off we fell apart.

3. did reasonably well for 30 minutes and I thought we looked quite good then they put an extra man in midfield and after that we barely touched the ball. Clingan and Fozzy went missing.

4. As I am sure has been said by many others we simply have to have 2 up front. The situation last night was not helped by the fact we could not retain possession because every time we cleared the ball it just came straight back. Its not Curo's fault as that is not the type of player he is. he's actually showing good goalscoring form this pre-season and alongside a decent partner he will get goals.

5. Pattison is utter, utter sh*te whatever position he is played in. If he is in the team then the team is not good enough - end of story!

6. I have to question the wisdom of playing these games against top prem opposition as part of our pre-season build up as they seem to me to just be bad for morale as we are given the runaround. I guess the financial gain outwieghs the downsides but at the very least we should build up to it more than jumping straight from a game against Swedish postmen to a game against the likes of Spurs.

Posted By: Jim, Jul 29, 10:03:07