Jay22 wrote:Also, sorry to be negative, but our defending in the first half was pathetic. It was like we didn't even tried stopping them from scoring. Pathetic really.
Kos needs to get his mojo from last year back.
Our defensive frailties were down to a new CB pairing where they hadn't played together before (often, so don't give me stats) and the fact that they both had particularly bad games. Also, our wide men weren't helping our full back at all during the opening half an hour, and Reading used the overlap to devastating effect. Thirdly, whereas usually while defending you would see our front 4 (ST, LW, RW, CAM) getting back into the half fairly quickly to congest space, this barely happened with Arsha, Theo, Gnabry and Chamakh in the first, and also quite often in the second and later. These are just some of my opinions, but we generally really were quite poor in defense. I'm not worried though considering the manner in which we conceded them and the fact that our first XI should defend better.