Norwich 2-0 Bolton.

I'd be on board with it if he was bringing on Silva and Bale.

but, er, he's not.

It says it all. We are back in the bottom three. The home game to QPR and away to wolves are going to be huge six pointers as well.

Even if you could justify the gamble he took, you can't justify how he did it! There were two, possibly three better options on the bench than Davies.
If we really wanted to go for it, we wanted pace and trickery - just a little bit of footballing quality. Instead we went for the dreaded rugby style of attack involving Kevin Davies which in my opinion was the worst thing about our game for the first half of the season, from a defensive point of view as well as offensive.

Lets hope the new signings, if he plays them, hauls his arse out of the fire.

We were much better going forward with Davies on the pitch, we created NOTHING in the first half, if we had a shot on goal i'd be surprised.

As soon as he came on the ball was sticking up top.

but it meant the midfield was spit through. Simple.

The ball was sticking, but unfortunately, it wasn't being put away.

Yeah but the sub improved us massively going forward.

The Tuncay sub was a poor one IMO, Eagles was pish in the first half but he woke up 2nd half and was playing well.

that sub neutered us.

I agree. The strikers were there, with nobody to feed them

The substitution was a gamble and it didn't work. You can see Coyle's thinking with the 2 CBs both replaced but why does he still believe that a 4 man midfield without Muamba is going to stop Norwich flooding through? A Davies/Ngog pairing is never going to score a lot of goals and we would have been better off prioritising going for a clean sheet.

I love Owen Coyle but I sometimes wonder if he gets bored at games. At 0-0 he should have been happy - 5 points from Liverpool, Arsenal & Norwich would have been brilliant, but he always feels he has to chase a winner - when will he learn? Having said that, the players once again put in a sub-standard performance and Coyle must be sick to death of it.

When ex-players become managers, its often assumed that they will manage according to the type of player they were. Generally speaking, this has turned out to be right, e.g. Big Sam was more inclined to know, understand, and use when necessary, a more defensive minded team, whereas OC, being an attacker, is showing that his knowledge of in-depth midfield and defensive tactics are lacking. An old saying, (George Graham?) is that you have to build a team from the back. Without a firm defence, you are giving up the last third of the park

Megson was a scrappy, pace and technique lacking defensive midfielder...

Just about sums him up. Didn't know bugger-all about attack or defence, and stood still in the middle.

gloswhite wrote:When ex-players become managers, its often assumed that they will manage according to the type of player they were. Generally speaking, this has turned out to be right, e.g. Big Sam was more inclined to know, understand, and use when necessary, a more defensive minded team, whereas OC, being an attacker, is showing that his knowledge of in-depth midfield and defensive tactics are lacking. An old saying, (George Graham?) is that you have to build a team from the back. Without a firm defence, you are giving up the last third of the park

That makes a lot of sense to me. OC looks like he is building a team he would have liked to play in. Having said that, on paper we should be better defensively than we are. Part of the problem is that if we do not have Reo-Coker and Muamba operating in a 5 man midfield we get overrun as Mavies and the wingers are pretty useless at defending. In some ways even more worrying is that we are terrible at defending set plays and have conceded too many headed goals. That suggests to me that there is something wrong with the defensive coaching.

I think your right about the defence too. Without a change in tactics, the players continue to do what they think is right, not always seeing the bigger picture, hence Knight going out to meet attackers, often being caught on the wrong side of them, with Wheater making do-or-die tackles. Who knows, maybe Tim Ream will take over marshalling the back four, with, hopefully Knight dropping to the bench. At the moment they are playing like 4 individuals, rather than a defensive team.

Coyles philosophy would be a joy to watch if we had any players with an ounce of talent.

until then, he needs to play 4-5-1 and play for 0-0's

your a negative little terd arnt you hipster

Ah, at least he's consistent

there's no doubt the players underperformed yesterday and the manager made some tactical errors.

but come on folks, we're still in touch with wolves & qpr - several weeks ago we thought we'd be down by now.

not-so-plain-jayne wrote:
but come on folks, we're still in touch with wolves

Because they're only slightly less shit than us.

Neither club is averaging at a point a game and even that is relegation form.