by TonyM » Tue Sep 22, 2009 8:46 am
Doug, you know the Marks well enough and I think you are subtle enough to ask them something in a positive way so could you ask them what they could have done to change the game as we lost "control" of the game second half (here are some examples of what I thought they could have done)...
1. bring on Weiss on Sunday? Especially when Tevez looked wrecked towards the end and we needed an outlet to get out of our own half. Without a target man I would have thought a tricky whippet would be the next best thing.
2. decide to man mark Giggs at some point in the second half? He was their chief threat and I was screaming out for someone to do this. If we could have nullified him for even 5 minutes we would have gained enough control to get out of our own half for more than 5 seconds.
3. tell Given to roll the ball out to his defenders and build from there? First half we won many of those punts up the left wing to Barry, Bellamy and Tevez but United shut this down second half. Yet we persisted. I think this was the main reason for us not getting more of a hold on the game second half and it was shockingly easy to avoid.
4. address the right flank issues where all the goals came from? I can excuse most of this though as we only had Zabba to call on and I'm not sure just changing players would have made a big difference.
I am only interested in their take on their ability to change a game in progress. It's the only concern I have about Hughes and Co. I like their passion, what they say and generally what they do, e.g. their ability to find the right players and form a squad seems very tight and together. I'm liking how we are playing too, all be it that I think the strategy of soaking up pressure and scoring on the break is a bit risky. But I'm still concerned about our ability to change the flow of a game or fall back on plans B, C and D. To an extent I feel we sometimes leave too much to chance and hope.
I'm sure the players will learn from this defeat. There are obvious to focus on I think and I would think relatively easy thing to fix. What's not so obvious is what Hughes and Bowen have learned and plan to do differently going forward. I'd really appreciate you trying to pry some info from them on this and then blabbing it to us. Thanks a lot Doug.
(And if you feel this just isn't worth asking then fair enough. At least writing it out here gets it out of my system. :-)