Quote: king of the shed "I think that about sums it up for me, a fair review of the match. A poor game played by two poor sides reffed by a poor ref (in a quality stadium mind)
Just a note regarding lying on / holding down (and not being straight at the play the ball for that matter), something someone told me a long time ago, you only ever spot it when it's the opposition doing it and never your own side, funny that. Both team were guilty of it, and believe me I'm furious at the amount of times we did it, but one side was penalised more times for it.
One other reffing issue that drove me mad tonight and has done most of the season, the referee penalised us 3 times for not playing the ball correctly and FC once, now your not telling me that on only 4 occasions this evening the ball wasn't played correctly, either they penalise them all or none at all, it's just slowing the game down.
I thought we did some good things tonight with ball in hand and defended really well for long periods but we just lack some class and speed out wide on attack.
Saying that, and I know all teams go through it, without Adamson, Parker, Talau, White and Ratchford then having to move to centre, in a squad as small as ours we are always going to struggle <----not an excuse BTW. A few decent performances IMO tonight, Henry, Cashmere, Goulding to name a few.
As for FC, well I can't work you lot out, you've good players and good young players at that, but you look to lack a leader and at times were very pedestrian and a little clueless if you don't mind me saying. Is it coaching or the players?
If either team had met a good side tonight we'd have been hammered i'm sure you'll all agree.'"
It was a very poor game, especially the 1st half and given our inability to keep hold of the ball and some of the ridiculous decisions we made towards the end, I don't think we would have deserved to win.
I thought we were quite unlucky with some of the refereeing decisions and most 50/50 calls seemed to go against us almost every time. And like you said we were pinged on several occasions for slowing the game down but both teams were guilty of it.
The incorrect play the ball thing is completely pedantic and a rule that really annoys me sometimes. There's a large number of incorrect play the balls in every game if you're going by the letter of the law. The rule should only be enforced when teams are using it to their advantage as a quick play the ball, not when a player has been held down and all the players are pretty much back in the defensive line.
I don't know whether it was our good defence or Hull's complete inability to do anything on our line but to only concede 14 points given the sheer amount of possession they had, we did quite well and I did think that our goalline defence at times was very good.
Some of our decisions towards the end were confusing to say the least. What exactly were Wilshere and Alker doing kicking the ball that early in the tackle count I don't know.
