Bolton v Derby

[BWFC_Insane]

It's a start though isnt it? Even if we were poor for 70 mins a clean sheet and a win can only be good.

Indeed it is hopefully we can build on tonight's win.. Winning is a good habbit and one we will need if we want promotion.

The good thing is that when we did play, we looked a class above them, and started to open them up fairly regularly. When we don't have the ball we still need to get better, and we need to keep it better as well!

[TANGODANCER]

TD - Kevin Davies was much better tonight, though I still think him being in the team encourages the long ball.

.

Commentators had a discussion tonight, bones of which was " Davies isn't doing anything wrong, it's just that banging long balls at him isn't working. We needed something a little different, got it and it worked"

I think if you check back on my posts I've been saying that for quite a while. Bogdan got cheered, did he not, when he actually threw the ball out tonight. We have four strikers (when N'gog actually gets fit). It's up to Coyle to use them sensibly. Sordell didn't seem to happen tonight, doesn't mean he won't in future.

[ChrisC]

It's a start though isnt it? Even if we were poor for 70 mins a clean sheet and a win can only be good.

Indeed it is hopefully we can build on tonight's win.. Winning is a good habbit and one we will need if we want promotion.

The good thing is that when we did play, we looked a class above them, and started to open them up fairly regularly. When we don't have the ball we still need to get better, and we need to keep it better as well!

I was saying the same to my match buddy tonight, we look a class above when we break but the back line is conference standard at the moment.

[Ianmooreslovechild]

It's a start though isnt it? Even if we were poor for 70 mins a clean sheet and a win can only be good.

Indeed it is hopefully we can build on tonight's win.. Winning is a good habbit and one we will need if we want promotion.

The good thing is that when we did play, we looked a class above them, and started to open them up fairly regularly. When we don't have the ball we still need to get better, and we need to keep it better as well!

Early days.Can only beat whats infront of us.They drew 5 apiece the other day didnt they?

Maybe if coyle can get this combative midfielder then we'll be able to compete better against teams less willing to give us the ball back.Too many selfers in the team for us ever to be able to keep it mind. A fortunate clean sheet is still a clean sheet so who knows. It's good that Mr Positive finally has something to be positive about without looking like a complete charlatan

[ChrisC]

TD - Kevin Davies was much better tonight, though I still think him being in the team encourages the long ball.

.

Commentators had a discussion tonight, bones of which was " Davies isn't doing anything wrong, it's just that banging long balls at him isn't working. We needed something a little different, got it and it worked"

I think if you check back on my posts I've been saying that for quite a while. Bogdan got cheered, did he not, when he actually threw the ball out tonight. We have four strikers (when N'gog actually gets fit). It's up to Coyle to use them sensibly. Sordell didn't seem to happen tonight, doesn't mean he won't in future.

Boggers did get cheered for rolling the ball out and from then on we played the ball on the floor more.. almost asif the players thought ok time to change it.. wasn't close enough to Coyle to hear if he told them to or not.

[BWFC_Insane]

TD - Kevin Davies was much better tonight, though I still think him being in the team encourages the long ball.

.

Commentators had a discussion tonight, bones of which was " Davies isn't doing anything wrong, it's just that banging long balls at him isn't working. We needed something a little different, got it and it worked"

I think if you check back on my posts I've been saying that for quite a while. Bogdan got cheered, did he not, when he actually threw the ball out tonight. We have four strikers (when N'gog actually gets fit. It's up to Coyle to use them sensibly. Sordell didn't seem to happen tonight, doesn't mean he won't in future.

Yeah and what Afobe did was run, Sordell for me doesn't look comfortable playing the deeper striker role, Afobe seems to like chasing lost causes and it helped a lot.

When we got it down and played we looked good.

Even the longer game is fine, so long as people pick up the second ball. All too often first half Davies won the ball, but we lot out on the second ball.

I think through no fault of his own tonight, him being on the pitch meant the back four instead of taking responsibility just lumped it up.

But he scored and played well overall so feck it....

[Peter Thompson]

Simple question - as manager can Coyle not tell /coach Bogdan to roll the ball out, and can he not also instruct / coach the players to pass to feet instead of playing constant aimless hoofball - it all comes down to the manager's instructions and how strictly he tells them to follow his instructions.

When we play to feet & actually pass the ball, we are not that bad - especially in this league

[Little Green Man]

There was a bit of grousing on here about the fitness/sharpness of the players in the Burnley game. Was there any noticable difference tonight?

[norm the jedi]

Simple question - as manager can Coyle not tell /coach Bogdan to roll the ball out, and can he not also instruct / coach the players to pass to feet instead of playing constant aimless hoofball - it all comes down to the manager's instructions and how strictly he tells them to follow his instructions.

When we play to feet & actually pass the ball, we are not that bad - especially in this league

It's about confidence mainly - the team are just off getting battered around the gaff for six months then they get battered again 'at this level' on Satdy.. just cos you're better don't mean you'll do the right thing or be any good with low confidence..
with confidence comes doing the stuff you can do and being better.. Cotle can do what he likes once Boggers is on the pitch it's feck all to do with Coyle what the lad does under pressure..
Once 11 blokes go across a white line the managers influence is about 2% of feck all.. if they don'yt believe in themselves or each other jesus h christ could give the team talf and fish sarnies at half time and it would make no odds.. managers don't win games players do..

[ChrisC]

There was a bit of grousing on here about the fitness/sharpness of the players in the Burnley game. Was there any noticable difference tonight?

They seemed fine to me.. Wasn't at the Burnley game so nothing to compare it to but we seemed OK tonight.

[Worthy4England]

My two pennorth.

First the queue at the ticket office to pick up my pre-bought tickets - wtf was all that about and why can't I print 'em at home anymore.

Then to the match.

The first 45 minutes were fecking dire. We were awful they weren't much better. Team got booed off at half time and it looked like two mid-table Championship sides with nowt to play for and 3 games left. It was every bit as bad as Saturday, with some notable exceptions. Knight, despite people near me saying "fcuking Knight again" every time he cleared it, cleared it, generally well and purposefully. Couple of occasions Bogdan screaming at folk to take a roll-out/throw out from him as they roundly ignored him and headed for the HW line to await the "punt". Davo, despite getting stick for everything, actually won most of what went in his direction and won it pretty well - I thought he was very poor Saturday, looked much better today. But all that is against the context of being very shit generally.

Had Derby converted a couple of chances they had (or had we) it might have been a different game. When they scored the disallowed goal after half time, I thought "here we go", but fortunately it was disallowed.

When Coyle subbed off Sordell, it was the right substitution, got plenty of stick from folk near me for the sub, but Sordell had been as anonymous today as he was Saturday.

Nowt much happened for us up to about 75 minutes, it was like watching paint dry, then we seemed to find "something", a few passes strung together and it started to look like we were getting on top and had a couple of chances before Dave scored a well taken goal. Last 15 minutes we were pretty much on top, although they hit the post and in the final analysis possible just about shaded it, although 2-0 flattered us and it could have been three or four as we created a couple more clear cut chances including Afobe with only the keeper to beat, before Eagles bagged the second.

It wasn't great, in a footballing sense, but there was palpable relief at the final whistle.

Folk say the sign of a great side is playing badly and winning. I think on today's showing playing badly and winning was just the sign of the other side not being very good either.

Davo got MotM in the Ground, personally I think it was probably between him, Chungy, Knight and Eagles - could've probably picked any of them.

There were still times in the midfield where the opposition got way too much space and generally exploited that all the way to our penalty area. It's easy to blame the defence, but out central two in MF need to do much much more, defensively.

[Lennon'sEleven]

I'm just pleased that, with other results going our way, it's back in our own hands.

[Worthy4England]

Simple question - as manager can Coyle not tell /coach Bogdan to roll the ball out, and can he not also instruct / coach the players to pass to feet instead of playing constant aimless hoofball - it all comes down to the manager's instructions and how strictly he tells them to follow his instructions.

When we play to feet & actually pass the ball, we are not that bad - especially in this league

There seemed to be a clear "instruction" tonight when Boggers had the ball, that the team "assembled on the half-way" then he hoofed it.

There were a number of occasions where he was screaming at Ricketts/Mears to hold for a throw out which they just ignored and carried on chugging up to the half-way.

[Harry Genshaw]

I was at both games. Still a lot to worry about but who knows what this win will do for us.

I still believe we need 5 in midfield as Andrews & Mavies were again in danger of being over ran. Derby though lined up as 4-4-2 as well which meant we got away with it.

Agreed with earlier comments. When we get it down and play we should have too much for many in this division BUT you have to win your battles first, and we were slow in doing that. SKD did more in the opening 20 minutes than he did in the whole game at Burnley. He was named as man of the match but I thought once again, Knight was our best player.

A deserved win in the end but one little moan. Too many in the crowd were waiting to jump on the teams back, and the first mistake was greeted with howls of derision - this wont help! Had a guy behind me who repeated ad infinitum "We should be hammering 5hit teams like this" as if all we haev to do is turn up and teams will roll over. THis is the level we're at now

[Vertigo]

Great news to wake up to.

From what I hear, we still need a 5 man midfield and an alteration in full back (Riley + Alonso???).

[thebish]

I'm just pleased that, with other results going our way, it's back in our own hands.

[SmokinFrazier]

I said in a thread on here or somewhere else that when we do get that first win, it'll be scrappy. We massively lack confidence right now and that is hurting the team performances, more so than anything else including the manager and the formation. Until we get that confidence back, we won't play any good football but that is why today was such a crucial game. If we had lost this, then there would be panic amongst the fans on here, plenty of abuse for call and even less confidence going into the Forest game. Now though, we can look towards building a bit of momentum and the sooner we do that, the players will play better and it'll have a domino effect going into future games.

Whilst the game tonight sounded awful in parts, that was always going to be the case. I expect we'll look poor against Forest at times too, and if we win that, we'll look poor against the next team we play. I just hope the results can keep coming in because eventually, we'll start to look impressive and show our opposition what our players can actually do. The performances are inevitably going to be poor until the confidence is back and until that point, we're going to have to rely on some luck and gritty performances to win matches.

Our progression from this point on is going to be a slow one. If we manage to get another 3 wins on the bounce, maybe then we'll start to play the football we're capable of. Right now though, the players aren't capable of anything better than we're seeing...which sadly means plenty of nervous, frustrating nights for us fans!

This was the performance and result we needed though. Lets hope this game has set the foundations which we can build on for the rest of the season.

[hi there, i'm chris]

Tonight just showed for me how much we should be playing 4-3-3/4-4-1-1. We looked our most dangerous when Chris Eagles was running things through the middle. A midfield three of Andrews/Davies/Eagles makes so much sense, and with Eagles on the left it just felt like we were wasting a position.

Thought Knight was excellent, and Mills got better as the game went on, although both were very shakey for the first half an hour. Mears was poor, but happy go give him more games as he's not played a great deal of football over the last year or so.

I think once Lee gets his match fitness/run of games back he can win games on his own. Showed glimpes of it tonight. Can't imagine that there will be too many left backs who can handle an in form Lee.

SKD and Afobe linked up much better than Sordell and SKD, but that's because we finally got the ball on the ground and played football in the last quarter. The chip pass from SKD to Afobe was lovely, and he should have scored.

Not sold on Andrews yet. Gave the ball away a lot and and seemed to go missing quite a bit.

Shocking first half but much improved in the second half. If Derby were one of the better teams in the Championship last season then we 'should' pick up a lot of wins this season. If we play like we did for the last half an hour we shouldn't have a problem.

[William the White]

The relief - the delight...

In truth we had only ten minutes or so of football in the first half - when we looked much the better side...

The rest of the time the 'tactic' was the hoof to SKD. To be fair to him, he won it more than not, but to little effect. We looked poor.

The second half was better, and we were on top at the end (though came near to suicide once).

Plus side - Zat Knight will be better than OK at this level. Mills is much slower but more solid than Ream. LCY the best player on the pitch. Afobe looks threatening and should start against Forest - probably with Davies.

Enduring problems - a defence that is very nervous. A midfield four without a ball winner. a lack of variety in our play. Mark Davis cannot play effectively in a four.

This is a long season and we have a victory. I'm happy enough.

[a1]

everybody in the world since about 40 years ago knows they should be playing with 5 midfielders. ^^

everybody in the world apart from teamcoyle.

i'm getting liverpool at home , stoke at home vibes from this win.

*breathes in* phew sorted at last... [week later] uh oh , no its not.