Edited by Yard dog 68 on 16/8/2025, 4:06 pm
But it seems Sutton was brought in to mark their giant centre forward Smith (who missed a sitter for them in the second half when it was put on a plate for him) - not sure why as we have two big centre halves already and Sutton didn’t win a thing all day. MM set Sutton up to fail…. and he did. When he is given a chance, he has to take it with both hands but sadly he showed that he simply isn’t good enough for this level. The 532 was just the wrong formation and you could see that well before they got their second - MM should have changed it then and not waited until the second half. He also didn’t make many subs to really go after the game - he could have been much more proactive.
We were completely dominated by Swindon for the first 25 mins - they just looked so much better than us and were over-running our midfield - we were so deep it was unbelievable and had no outlet - so the ball just kept coming back. 2-0 did not flatter them at that point.
We then at least became competitive in the game and Quigley took his chance from a set piece (really only place we looked dangerous at that point). Then Robson had a good chance when through on goal but after a good first touch, smacked it off his knee with his second and the chance was gone.
Second half, we huffed and puffed a lot without really looking dangerous - as they sat back and asked whether we could break them down, which unfortunately we couldn’t .
Quigley should have scored late on and it looked a blatant handball when his shot was blocked for a pen, but it wasn’t given.
It got that desperate late on that some people around me were calling for Drummond…. but nothing is that bad surely!
Thought Ogle didn’t have a good game and his long throws are not the weapon they should be - we need a player to come shorter as he rarely reaches the danger area. Robson, who I really liked last week, was poor too and his distribution was not good enough.
Centre halves were ok - bit too panicky at times - and Manny was at fault for their first (but he wasn’t on his own as we had several chances to clear the danger).
Conlon was ok but Woods was a bit weak today - Hannant was mainly on the periphery of things, but I like the look of him.
Quigley, other than his goal, was the same as last week - busy but didn’t do a lot. Mikey had a bad game too - he was consistently offside in the first half and wasn’t learning his lesson, but his confidence can’t have been helped by the on field blasting from MM when there was a break in play.
Did we deserve anything from the game - for me, not really - we just didn’t do enough to deserve a point. We can’t keep giving teams an early lead and expect to be able to win matches and MM has to take most of the blame for his poor decisions re formation and selection.
But at least the sun was shining…..