Well, I was going to go to this away game, and I wish I did as this would have been a great night and we won as well. I had, however, catch the last 20 minutes and 15 minutes before half time, so altogether I was able to watch a good chunk of this game to be able to write this; however, I would have liked to watch the full match, but the Liverpool game was on instead. I have to say I am very impressed by what I watched, and I am very optimistic for the upcoming fixtures.
We deserved the three points, and it has now put us in a great position to move higher up the league, as we do not have to think about relegation this early in the season.
When the squad was announced I was shocked, purely because Ozan Tufan, Estupinan and Sinik were dropped and a few of our bench players were on instead. I did not think highly of this team and, with the form we are in at the moment, we were going to struggle. But it turns out that I was wrong and Dawson made the right decisions. Sometimes it is actually the right idea to switch up the squad like that and see what they play like without their star players. This team should be the starting eleven for every game; however, I do think maybe Sinik should start as he brings a lot of energy to the team.
The performance was quality today, where was that kind of level in our previous games? I do not know what made us play like that, but we played like we were actually fighting for promotion. Greaves was excellent, he was pushing up the field and making lots of decent crosses and he fought for the ball well. He was everywhere on the pitch too, pressuring whoever had the ball, definitely the best player on the pitch. Docherty was also another major player, and he also netted his first goal of the season and he did it in style, scoring the best goal of the match shooting just outside the box and hitting it accurately into the top right corner. Two of the goals we scored, finally, came from the run of play and they were not tap-ins either. One of the goals was a screamer and the other was a deflective goal, some would say it was lucky, but a goal is a goal and we made that chance possible.
Some misconceptions were, we were still going backwards at certain points, and we were still too open in defence, as too many runs were being made by the opposition’s attack. We kept losing the ball, but fortunately they did not cost us anything and Blackpool were unable to take advantage of our mistakes. However, there were still some improvements as whenever we did go backwards, we did not lose the ball and we were able to get the ball back up the pitch instead of us losing the ball halfway up the pitch. We also attacked fiercely, and we created a lot of opportunities, I think we could have scored more goals as well.
I am annoyed that I did not choose to go to this match, and I wish that this match was on instead of the Liverpool game as this would have been a more detailed report. I have put as much as I could into this though and I hope to have a better one out for the next game.
Hopefully we keep up this energy, positivity and willingness and we take it with us to our Yorkshire derby, against Rotheram, on Saturday.
Great description of the game. Well done Jack 👏