Said that at the time. Needed somebody buzzing around between their defence and midfield to give them more to think about.
Had McCourt and Dunne sitting deeper with Doughty man marked for an hour.
Hardly surprising he struggled to find any room or meaningful positions.
This to me was the issue today, setting a tone that strangled us for the rest of the game as we got frustrated. Against the team we played today, there was no reason to have Dunne and McCourt together sitting in front of the defence. Compounding that issue was the fact they man marked Doughty. Some basic intelligence is needed in that situation - move, pull the player all over the pitch if he wants to hold hands for the entirety. Then layer in that the wings may be an outlet but you have Carrol feeling about as comfortable as a man laying on a bed of nails playing wide right and we just didn't have a way of gaining a foothold. That created frustration and we never got our heads straight in the first half. You then concede an idiotic goal and now you have to make tactical decisions which don't allow you to fix the underlying problem.
I get that you want some consistency, and you look at last weekend thinking it all worked well so don't change it. But, we should have tweaked what we had before the game - no need for Dunne, play a bloody right back at right back.
Doughty, for an intelligent guy, had a dim witted game. Take some personal responsibility and test the 40 year old's willingness to follow you about for 90 minutes. Create gaps for others - it's not always about being the show boat on the ball.
I don't blame Anderson for missing - it was inevitable and I'd bet he misses as many as he scores even in practice. He just shouldn't have been near it.
Such a frustrating watch that one - not because we were shit, but because it was a win waiting to happen that we let slip too soon and too easily.
Wellens gets a chunk of blame today because some of his decisions created the problem, but the players need to ask themselves how they let themselves fall apart so easily. Take some responsibility to change things without needing to be told what to do - Doughty, looking at you here.
Reg - we are where we belong and Wellens is right to build for next season. Brown clearly fucked this up by tinkering for far too long after tying his own hands with the types of players he got in the door - he didn't recruit many bad players for this level, just didn't create a squad, gave himself no options and then kept trying to shoe horn options in rather than settling on a way to play. It's tough for Wellens to change that around sufficiently, and he has minimal margin for error as a result, for this season. There isn't a player in the team , maybe Dunne aside, who couldn't do a job in a team in the play offs - they were just put together poorly.
