Swindon Town v Peterborough United Official Matchday Thead

[Batch]

Phew. Sounded a bit laboured, but what we needed. ?

perfect summary

[Nemo]

Job done.

[Red Frog]

Only team in the top seven to win this afternoon. That's at least two points on all of them. Who's wobbling now?

[kerry red]

Obika should have got MoM.

Rodgers decent.

That's about all.

[joteddyred]

Big 3 points and a clean sheet.  We needed that even though the performance wasn't great.

Ref was shite, not one booking for Peterborough despite repeated fouls yet Turnbull is booked for a good challenge and now misses the next 2 matches.

Ricketts mom for me.  Certainly not Luongo.

[ronnie21]

Obika or Ricketts mom for me, Rodgers not far behind!  Luongo, average at best!!  Referee due back at the Wyvern at Xmas for pantomime!

[Bob's Orange]

Sorry sonic about my match report but.....

A good side would have walloped us today. The amount of times we gave the ball away was farcical. In my eyes we played with an over-arragance, almost lackadaisical.

Obika was excellent and my man of the match. For all the good Obika was, Williams was bad, low on confidence and missed a penalty and a sitter and every time the ball went to him the blue shirts went away with it.

Our defenders were good today, Ricketts looked confident. Rodgers turned to shit in the second half and Luongo got a bit better, but his head seemed somewhere else.

However, the 3 points are the most important think and fair play to Hylton for getting it. If we beat Yeovil at home and Preston and Mk drop points.... Who knows!

[adje]

been saying Luongo appears to be somewhere else for a while now.He is stll gonna play reasonably well techncally because he s a good player,but he should be dominatng games at this level

[OOH! SHAUN TAYLOR]

Sorry sonic about my match report but.....

A good side would have walloped us today. The amount of times we gave the ball away was farcical. In my eyes we played with an over-arragance, almost lackadaisical.

Obika was excellent and my man of the match. For all the good Obika was, Williams was bad, low on confidence and missed a penalty and a sitter and every time the ball went to him the blue shirts went away with it.

Our defenders were good today, Ricketts looked confident. Rodgers turned to shit in the second half and Luongo got a bit better, but his head seemed somewhere else.

However, the 3 points are the most important think and fair play to Hylton for getting it. If we beat Yeovil at home and Preston and Mk drop points.... Who knows!

What is it with Williams? Why would a 20 goal striker be low on confidence?' I don't get it.

[chalkies_shorts]

A welcome 3 points but don't let the win and clean sheet fool you. We were shit, Posh were worse. Byrne and Williams had absolute shockers to day. I'm surprised to see the positive comments about Rodgers who I thought was bollox. He'd do something decent, admire his work and then fuck it up and lost the ball in some dangerous positions today. Saying that, the number of times we gave the ball away and played ourselves into trouble a better team would have annihilated us today. Defensively we were all over the place again today.
Obika MOM for me.
It was quite interesting that the only decent tackle we put in today, Turnbull got booked. We were second best in every challenge and there were some real bottlers in the tackle today.
Its a good three points but its papering over the cracks and Posh were the perfect team to play today.  

[adje]

What is it with Williams? Why would a 20 goal striker be low on confidence?' I don't get it.

it may be that, even though he is top scorer,he has been by no means an automatic choice

[Reg Smeeton]

 Fair play to Cooper and the lads, badly needed something from today....and we've now got an unexpected bonus, in the form of Hylton scoring and Rodgers performing OK.

A point at Spotland confirms a PO place....

[@mwooly63]

To show the difference a massive budget makes ( not that we didnt already know )
City have Bradford away tuesday and arent coming back today.
Are staying up north to prepare.

Bristol City FC ‏@bcfctweets  20m20 minutes ago
SC: "We're staying up north and preparing properly."

3 points today was a must and gives us 13 pts over Rochdale, they can get a max 15 so would make the playoffs a certainty with one more win.
If its tuesday over Rochdale even better.
Need to finish 3rd or 4th tho to give us a greater chance

[normy]

I thought that Rodgers did very little first half, but made many mistakes second half losing the ball in dangerous positions where they should have scored if they'd been any good.

[Batch]

An important win today rather than a good one. Good for two reasons, 1) it gives the players a platform to improve on, any bit of extra confidence is good 2) it calms the jittery fans down a bit. I'm clearly a glass half empty person - but I thought we were collectively deflated for obvious reason, and the moans and groans were growing in perhaps disproportionate amounts to our current standing .

So on to the match itself. I make no apologies for how I saw it:

Today wasn't a great town performance, many players had off days but I think Luongo and Gladwin stand out as the main culprits for why it didn't go well. Luongo couldn't find his range of pass and again drifted in and out the game. Gladwin was mostly rubbish as opposed to he mostly good Gladwin of City. By contrast Rogers is a far more limited ability player, but he was the one putting in the effort and looking for the ball at every opportunity. This is why I thought he was out pick of our central midfielders.

Peterborough had more of the ball than I expected  as our inaccurate passing kept giving it to them. We didn't really click into gear, but at least early in the first half when we did break it looked like it might be a knife through butter had we actually found the right pass. In contrast nothing threatening our goal seemed to come from Peterborough - something that didn't really change for the first half. Our defence looked solid, and an incorrect booking for Turnbull has robbed us of possibly our best back three at Rochdale. Our attacking also petered out, and Byrne and Toffolo started to make mistakes and were none too effective.

However the one bright moment came when Obika turned smartly in the box, got a small tug on the shirt and from my seat seemed to go down easy. Up stepped Willo and hammered it onto the bar. And that summed up Willo's game really. He's easily our best striker when he's on form. But at the moment he's the Di Canio post injury Willo. He missed a sitter in the second half too. I really really want him back firing, but I'm not even sure who our best two strikers are now.

Second half all our frailties that were exposed during the City and Franchise game were there to see. We became ragged as Posh had a spell where they could have scored, looking dangerous as we failed to deal with them. Thankfully we rode the storm and Cooper spotted we needed something else on the field, so he took off Rogers (!) and brought on Swift and replaced Willo with Hylton. I'm not too sure about the first one, but hey it worked.

The one move of real quality lead to our goal, some nice passing in the Posh box saw Obika pick out Hylton who seemed not to make the best  contact on the ball, but to his delight it was far enough from the keeper to see him notch his first professional goal. After than he didn't do too much, but I guess his head was in the clouds and frankly who can blame him.

So did we deserve the win? probably not.
Would we win the playoffs playing like this? no.
Can we build from here? Absolutely.

MMOM : Rickets (or Obika)