Our tactics cost us in the end

He was never going to last getting so many goals!

 

mar manage to train goal scoring out of most players. Rammell started off banging the goals in but after we had him in preseason he usually got 8.

 

Am i imagining this, but didn't the mighty headless o'connell bag double figures in the season he got player of the year?

 

yes he got 10 one year and Biggins also broke the 10 barrier probably why we sold him.

 

I think Randy Camel scored borderline teens in his first season before someone had a word and told him not to get carried away!

 

yes he got 13 and Savillle 12 but we soon knocked that out of them. I remember when we signed Stuart Rimmer who scored 80 gazillion goals I thought he would be the answer. 1 goal later he was off.

 

He did scare Paul Stancliffe into that wonderful own goal at Wolves though. That was worth his transfer fee alone!

 

We finished 5th with these tactics, after a bad start under Struber. We lost to Swansea by very fine margins.

A lot of your points are well reasoned, but I would focus on the above.

 

VI summed all of this up perfectly in his post-match pressers. "We need too many chances to score a goal".

 

We were "played" by a well organised Swansea side, that have top flight players.

We had the best 3 strikers in our front line we've had for a long time from my memory. It just didn't happen.

I'm as pissed off as anyone about that bit of luck, refereeing decision(s), their keeper being MOTM in the first leg.

Everything in perspective.

 

Interesting fact, I used to live across the road from Ernie Hine's grandson (who was ~80 when I knew him). When I told him where I was from, he told me who his grandad was.

 

You have your opinion fixed on everything i seem to debate with you you do it with other posters failing to take into account anyone else's point of view but your own I was just stating

I think his lack of pace holds him back from been a top championship striker like toney, Lowe, solanke, ayew Watkins last season. You don't again we will have to agree to disagree.

Not nocking cauley at all he has been and still is a great striker for us all i said was i think he himself will want to score.more from.open play next season. And we can't just play to one players strengths that would be stupid were a team val came in took over a team on a very poor run played to the teams strengths and we finished our best position for 21 years happy ending ey?

 

I am not losing sight of the great achievement of finishing 5th. My real point was that though the tactics had served us well, they had begun to serve us less well. I really thought that we might try to take Swansea by surprise from the first whistle in the second leg and get the ball on the ground from the outset. After all, we had failed to score against them in all three previous games. It seemed to me that we really had to try something different. I am frustrated, because I feel we have ultimately wasted a great opportunity.

 

There's a lot of truth in what you say. Getting the defence to stop faffing around at the back was obviously a major improvement. The lads showed in number of games, however, notably away at Bournemouth, that they could beat top opposition by playing attractive football too. I would have liked to see us try the same at Swansea.

 

Woodrow was at his most prolific for us when he had Kieffer Moore alongside him. When Moore suffered his dreadful injury, Woodrow's goal return in League One went down significantly.

 

If you include the 1st leg against Swansea, though, the stats for 10 games are: w 4 d 2 l 4. That's mid-table form, whereas the previous 10 games produced w 9 d 1 l 0. My argument is that a way of playing which had been hugely successful had now ceased to be so. Swansea, having beaten us 3 times already this season, were unlikely to be beaten by tactics which had failed to score a single goal against them in three encounters. Surely we needed to try something different from the outset.