Oh dear. What an unpleasant way to spend a Saturday. We had intended to camp up near Blackpool and have a night on the town (well, at least the fish and chip shop) after the match. By Friday the weather forecast for Saturday night was torrential rain so we abandoned our plans. I thought that was going to be our big disappointment. Frankly standing in a field getting drenched would have been real fun compared to the afternoon’s fare.
Deano didn’t start the game. I understand he is injured but it is thought he’ll be out for only a week. I hope so. Yorke is nowhere near a Premiership player now – frankly there were lots of times last season when it wasn’t clear he was even a Championship player. Keane talked about perhaps having taking loyalty to the point of stupidity – did he mean Yorke (who came off at half-time)? Mind you Richardson moving into the centre second half wasn’t much better. There have been lots of positive words uttered and written about Etuhu but I am not convinced. Our central midfield today was a freezone for Wigan.
Worse news is Edwards out for a month. He was the player I most expected to make the step up. But now having had little pre-season and the first month out, one can see him playing catch up the rest of the season. In his place we seem to be rotating a series of strikers (Stokes, Murphy, even O’Donovan) and asking them if they can play a very specialist role.
We didn’t start too bad. The pitch was very slippy and we seemed to be coping with is slightly worse – but it was tricky for both teams. Mind you even before they scored Heskey and Sibierski had time to dive in the box. Neither was punished. Aren’t we supposed to be seeing a clampdown on “simulation”? Heskey also managed to elbow one of our players without even being spoken to.
With both teams trying to get a grip of matters after 20 minutes Wallace suddenly decided to give the ball straight to their right winger. The ball was whipped in (seemed to take a deflection) and came straight to Heskey in an acre of space. To be fair Gordon had no chance but, wrong as it is, you can’t prevent the thought going through your head “what do you get for £9m?” Mind you he did make one superb save from a Heskey header to keep it at 1-0 at half-time. TV replays show that Heskey was a mile offside for their goal – but despite the fact that it was down our end it didn’t even occur to me that it was at the time.
After their goal we never really got anywhere near the game. Murphy failed to convert what seemed like a good chance in the first half (I am not a Murphy fan). Second half I am actually struggling to think of a real chance we created. Chops ran around a lot (and perhaps with Miller – again having to play wide) was just about the only player who did himself any credit.
We were actually down to ten men when they got their first penalty with McShane off with a head injury – Collins doing one of those hanging onto the attacker that he used to seem to do all the time. McShane stayed off and Anderson came on but nothing really changed – he actually managed to be the one who gave the second penalty away.
A really, really bad day. A really, really bad performance. If you want to look for a silver lining you could think it probably increases the chances of us getting in extra players before the deadline.
This is not going to be the last stuffing we get this season. It is not going to be the last stuffing from an “unglamorous” team. That will be the case even if we have a good season. As supporters we need to decide whether we are going to support the team through the difficult times – or cheer last minute goals to the rafters but want nothing to do with the crap performances. A lot of people had left by the final whistle. Quite a few chose the occasion of the final whistle to boo. It’s a free country like. But I think it is Keano’s job to kick them up the arse for a performance like this and get things back on track – and I have confidence he will do his best to make that happen. I stayed there until the end and then applauded at the end – not for the performance, but as encouragement for the enormous task we face next week. I can’t think what else I can do to try to make a small contribution to us achieving in this league. I don’t want a medal for it (I’ll probably just get abuse on the message board for daring to say it) it is just my personal opinion on how best to support.
We’re all in this together – let’s stick together.
John aka Herts