by AG7 » Sat Feb 22, 2014 11:58 pm
Just finished watching the recorded game on Sky, these sat 3pm games on streams are useless as you can hardly see what's going on where so after watching the whole game (well, extended highlights as Sky put it) and the little MotD highlights, the biggest thing glaring at me is Jovetic substitution was a blessing in disguise ...
First sub Pellligrini did was JoJo on for Negredo ... understandable as two up front were very similar and taking each other's positions and not doing much ...
Second sub was mind boggling as the gaffer brought on Navas but took off Ferdy ... so essentially Yaya was sitting back in front of the back four and then we had these midgets (Navas, Nasri, Silva) trying to get around the Stoke's tall physical presence and ten of them sitting behind the ball ...
JoJo then unluckily (luckily for us actually) feels his hamstring tighten and calls for a sub, so Pelligrini was forced to take him off (who himself was a sub) and brought Garcia on ... which is when Yaya moved up the field and got a little freed from his defensive holding duties and that's why he was where he was when that cross came in and finally we broke them down ...
Had JoJo not pulled that hamy, we'd be trying same of the old which wasn't working and might have ended up with another 0-0 against Stoke, which seemed to be what they all were working towards ...
Pellegrini doesn't seem to have a plan B yet ...
