Originally Posted by
passinginterest
I think Razor has summed up a lot of my thoughts on it in his last few posts. One of the frustrating things about Kenny is his reluctance to change things or have a plan B (feels like we’ve been saying that since the Trap days anyway). He sets up a particular way and he doesn’t seem to be learning to make dynamic changes. The subs always seem to be that little too late and like for like, even if they’re slightly different players coming in. Knight coming on could have allowed a change to more of a front 2 with him behind but he just went into the same spot as Parrot.
The really frustrating thing is, they’ll almost certainly be much better against Scotland and Ukraine and 4 or even 6 points wouldn’t be a massive shock. As Razor has said, Armenia are in the same league as us, so they’re meant to be around our level. Yet, for long spells we cruised through the game and hardly gave up a chance. We’ve long struggled to put the ball in the net and that was the downfall again. There’s quick exciting talent coming through, which is great against better teams who play higher up, but those are the very players that can be shut down with a team playing deep. We lack a pure goal poacher and worse a genuine creative midfielder who would be the idea players against a team sitting so deep. Even at that, we had something like 26 crosses according to LiveScore, they weren’t all punts into the box either, in the first half especially there was a few really dangerous ones where we broke their lines but the finish just didn’t come. That’s the type of play we lacked completely in the last five years, when set pieces seemed to be our only chances. Set pieces still look our best chances now, but at least there’s something else being created.
It’s a horrible result. Another box set back, but there was good progress in the previous games and there’s potential now to bounce back again. No doubt Kenny is under pressure with anything less than 5 points from the next three games.