This was open on a tab after the match but not posted:
Kind of a weird game, hard to know how I feel. On one hand, rode our luck hugely given the woodwork came to our rescue twice and Kelleher saved a penalty. Worth saying that we probably should have had 3, the offside goal looked inches off (watching live) and the Doherty header at the back post was a serious miss, along with some extended periods of pressure.
Weirdly there were a lot of encouraging individual performances - don’t even need to talk about Caoimhin, both the centre halves were strong, Collins was much better than the Greece game and Scales looks clearly good enough. Doherty, Ebosele and Ferguson had these nice bits of interplay on the right where we were comfortable and creative in possession. Ferguson looks much closer to himself than he did a month ago or two months ago, and Festy looks like a capable replacement for Cheo, he’s not the finished article but he’s got raw pace to scare anyone and really quick feet. Knight had a good game, Cullen was solid - we were a little stretched at times but I don’t think that’s on them. Szmodics was very sharp and looked quicker than I’d ever seen, probably suited him to be central, even though he plays wide left for his club - Johnston totally outmatched his fullback and O’Dowda looked better defensively than we’ve seen him. There were also a few decent cameos off the bench…
The main feeling of disappointment is in that at times we were outplayed in midfield and they dominated possession for large periods and occasionally we just launched it long and ceded possession but when we actually tried to play, we were decent. I think Finland are a really poor team, they’re a shadow of the side that we played back in 2020 that went to the Euros just after, so that’s worrying. Saying that, can’t think of any other chances they had apart from the ones they nearly scored, and the one chance that the lad drop short of his centre half and snatched over the bar - I saw we had 12 shots (excluding the offside goal) to their 6.
Great to win and happy to reserve judgement, realistically for another 12 months. We’ve beaten Finland home and away, needing a huge amount of luck in both games, lost home and away to Greece and were absolutely outclassed by England. That’s probably par at best - but these windows have been really trying to find time to work with players, players play for their clubs on Saturday and Sunday, have recovery on Monday and Tuesday, light training Wednesday and play Thursday, recovery on Friday and Saturday, play Sunday. Pre-covid, you used to have say Saturday - Wednesday, where you’d have 6 days to work with the squad before game 1 and 4 days till game 2. The new calendar makes the job nearly impossible
Just on the international calendar, I believe it's changing soon to having a four game international window each Autumn, so that might help a bit. The current setup with the three short windows is messy. Not sure if that's coming in as soon as next season though. Hopefully the squad get a decent period together in June ahead of the WC qualifiers if it turns out they're not starting for us until next Autumn.
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