It's nothing to do with Lampard's strategy, high blocks, low blocks. Or any of that. That is just excuses.
It's just that JDS and Kitching are emphatically not good enough defenders for a team at our level and with our pretensions. And any amount of good passing or nifty footwork does not change that. Thomas has made himself good enough this season and MVE always has his speed to bale himself out.
Only a blind partisan can not see that neither is good enough for a top of the Championship team
I used to like KItching, but how can you when he makes so many errors and lacks the speed to get himself out of trouble
It's nothing to do with Lampard's strategy, high blocks, low blocks. Or any of that. That is just excuses.
It's just that JDS and Kitching are emphatically not good enough defenders for a team at our level and with our pretensions. And any amount of good passing or nifty footwork does not change that. Thomas has made himself good enough this season and MVE always has his speed to bale himself out.
Only a blind partisan can not see that neither is good enough for a top of the Championship team
I used to like KItching, but how can you when he makes so many errors and lacks the speed to get himself out of trouble
No, the point is actually our defence isn’t that bad in the first instance and that you over fixating on what other teams defences are doing is irrelevant because we’re the top scorers in this league by a massive margin.
Oxford and Pompey actually have top half defensive records so using them as an example was misleading.
I think our defence is generally fine individually, it's the openness in the middle of the park and our lack of pressure on the ball in certain situations that has been causing us problems.
For a large portion of the game (the middle 60 odd minutes where we looked particularly shit) on Tuesday our "midfield" consisted of only Josh Eccles.
Keep playing like that and we will get carved to bits.
Yet somehow we are top of the league and actually went five games without conceding earlier this season. And in the league 6 of the goals we've conceded have come in the games JDS missed or wasn't on the pitch. He has only missed 3 matches and 74 minutes. It's quite evident that both are good enough and that's why the team is top of the league with an exceptional goal difference.
I think our defence is generally fine individually, it's the openness in the middle of the park and our lack of pressure on the ball in certain situations that has been causing us problems.
For a large portion of the game (the middle 60 odd minutes where we looked particularly shit) on Tuesday our "midfield" consisted of only Josh Eccles.
Keep playing like that and we will get carved to bits.
It’s clearly tactical and like any system, there’s trade offs. We can’t lockdown the defence without compromising the chance creation.
We really should have scored 2 more goals than we actually did against Millwall and arguably Leicester too.
We’ve conceded 5 goals v Ipswich and 3 v Birmingham in December. People are letting one bad month alter their entire perception of the defensive unit as a whole.