ClarkeyCat agrees with all of KIB man’s points but he won’t post here any more because he fell out with Rocko over the site upgrade and lay-out. He was seething with Ireland’s approach to football the other evening. Seething, so he was.
we got a result. nothing was certain beforehand.
a win would have been nothing short of miraculous, given our away record and their home one.
you can’t change the formation without dropping Keane, our record scorer and the only one who is doing the business for us in this group.
either find 2 better midfielders or find another manager.
Treaty_Exile has responded well and more succinctly than I tend to.
It obviously wasn’t certain annihilation, it was excusable because the result excused it.
Obviously there are plenty of people who think the formation was justified. They’ve been posting on the various threads. Once again you’ve failed to present any real alternative. Was it McCarthy for Keane you wanted? You must have posted 30 times on the match since it ended with criticism every time (not to mention your hysterics beforehand and during the game) but you still haven’t said what you’d actually do instead.
In an ideal world we’d have played a more expansive game with more expansive players. In an ideal world we’d have better players. Even if we had one of Gibson or Fahey we could have contemplated an extra body in midfield. Without them I don’t agree that McCarthy was a reasonable alternative in the circumstances given his inexperience. After that it boils down to asking a striker to play in midfield (which I don’t agree with generally, other than suggesting one plays deeper than the other) or playing one of the wingers inside and picking Hunt. I don’t think either Duff, McGeady, Keane or Doyle would have made an appreciable difference to the way we were exposed in the middle of the park and I don’t think any of those players in midfield would have done much to allow us keep much more possession. Arguably the only change on the night that allowed us any sort of possession was Cox for Doyle.
ClarkeyCat will do well to remember who is friends are when myself and Bandage are allocating TFK’s tickets for the Armenia game.
his only actual suggestion was to play one of Ward, Hunt or Foley in midfield instead of Keane.
Really good article rocko. Well balanced and agree with majority of it. Start the research on Andorra/Armenia and post up soon please to allow for extended debate. From my brief statistical research of games Armenia look very capable. Few comments on your article anyway:
- I really am not sure Clark is a real alternative at leftback in short term. He was very poor there against Wales. Was poor positionally and I remember being particularly disappointed as position we need someone to emerge in. While he could be an option there in the longterm (I think Ward will mature into capable leftback also) with no time for experimentation I really doubt he is going to feature competively in that position
- Likewise while our midfield situation is getting more and more worrying are we really going to put someone in there who hasn’t featured yet (Garvan, McCann). As you correctly say one of our strengths is familiarity. Putting someone in who hasn’t featured for us yet is unlikely to happen
- I don’t think Trap has failed to experiment enough in friendlies. Making several changes in friendly match is largely useless exercises. Players need to be brought in in two or threes imo.
- Do you not think Cox could be ahead of Doyle/Long in pecking order. At moment he appears to have aerial ability of Doyle coupled with a Longesque energy level.
I don’t think Clark, Garvan or McCann are short term options. It’s an assessment of who we might be able to call in over the next few games to see if they can give us options. None are really considerations for the next competitive games.
I mostly agree on the friendlies but within games there have been chances to look at slightly different formations and we haven’t done so. I don’t think you can separate our good competitive results from the friendlies and we definitely improve as a team from playing regularly together - just would like to see us identifying who we need to watch and how we could try some variations on the current setup.
I’d be surprised if Cox was ahead of either. To be fair it’s hard to call. Not many thought Cox would get the start in Macedonia, then Doyle was probably the frontrunner for the Slovakia game and lost out that time on the initial selection. I think if Long and Doyle are in any sort of form then it’s between them. But if Doyle doesn’t start against Armenia I’d suspect Cox might be more likely to come off the bench.
ClarkeyCat is just being a drama queen.
I know ye are lambasting Kib for not offering alternative options but personally, I wouldn’t be calling for alternatives, personnel wise, because there are none (bar Gibson), but I think after 4 years or whatever of this core group playing together that they should be able to produce some kind of cohesive play, particularly in relieving pressure. The fullbacks hoofing the ball forward and giving it straight back to the opposition is one of our biggest flaws, imo. Is it unrealistic to expect Whelan or Andrews to receive the ball form the fullback, possibly play it back to them and then look for the pass again and perform some kind of triangle, maybe with the winger, as you see these overpaid cunts doing in training all the time? Maybe even spread the play across as the pressure is relieved and the opposition retreat somewhat. Because this appears to be beyond them or not the “tactic”. But they’re surely capable of it. I don’t think anyone expects some maestro to pick up the ball, make time and space for themselves and then spray an inch perfect pass through for Keane to run onto and score. But basic team moves were lacking the last week and for a team two campaigns in, I think that’s really poor.
The reason KIB is getting lambasted for not suggesting personnel alternatives is that the core of his argument was that we shouldn’t have lined up with the same type of midfield as we played in the home game. Andrews came in for Green but made little difference but without the first two possible alternatives (Gibson and McCarthy) we were stuck anyway. I think it’s unlikely we’d have started with 3 in midfield regardless but at least we could have changed it up or freshened the midfield if one of those two was on the bench.
I think it’s more of an indictment on the players than on the management that they can’t work simple triangles with the full backs. I do accept that we should still be striving to improve and I think we need to find ways of involving the wingers in less conventional positions. The other night against Slovakia it was evident at the game that there were loads of times when the wingers were free in space on the opposite flank to the ball. The players knew to switch it, they were just horribly slow in doing so. I reckon they were worse than normal that night though and we have played some reasonable possession football at times in this group, just not in the last two games.
Scenes of wild celebration there after we scrape a fortuitous 0-0 draw against Russia. Some fellas are easily pleased, i wonder what Roy Keane would think of the height of these fellas ambition…
Dunph, that video was from the night before the game. Deary me, did you not listen to Razor Houghton calling on the supporters to get behind the team the next day? John Delaney is the man. 