What are you hoping to extract here, some kind of recognition that only your opinion and interpretation are correct? Again, I've already explained my opinion in detail - be as reductive as you like, it doesn't get you any more of the win you're apparently so desperate for.
Did enough. Two well constructed goals and finished well by Andre. Thought Zinc showed some nice touches and his assist was classy. Bachmann is starting to look a little shaky in recent games. Do not know what he was thinking punching/pushing the guy who was offside. Still a clean sheet. Agree with others that Sarr and Sema look shattered. Zinc could have given Sarr a rest for Saturday, but with Cleverley likely to be out, we may need to play him more central again. Hughes is such a competent and reliable player. Things work better for everyone when he is in the middle of everything. It’s between him and Kiko for player of the season so far. You would have to give the nod to Kiko on the basis of number of games played. Content with the display. I have a sense of foreboding about the forest game though. But we will see.
Xisco only started to play like this once performances got really bad, and once Deeney was injured but almost everyone else was available, imagine if Ivic had an actual left-back, or could actually start Will Hughes
Have pretty much addressed this already, but okay. I think if he'd come in day one and played 4-3-3 we'd probably have even more points. But I'd also point out that he didn't exactly have an international break, or even a full uninterrupted week of training to implement a new system. As soon as he had that opportunity, we've looked very good, and got the wins to show for it. Since he arrived, only Norwich have won more points. Whatever way you spin it, that's an achievement, and he's done a good job so far.
Tonight showed what happens when you have a striker playing. Not sure who this new guy is, but he took his chances brilliantly. If only Gray could do this. Just reaffirms what Toney would have given us this season. We'd probably have the Championship won by now. Good, run-of-the-mill victory. Nothing special and wont stay in the memory long, but 2-0 was about right. Even so, on another day it could have been very different. I didn't see too much wrong with their offside goal, and they had a couple of decent shouts for a penalty. Thought the second one was sure to be given. Apart from that, they didn't offer too much. Bachmann, once again rooted to his line with crosses and looks shaky as hell when he has to come for it. Also, he seems to be dwelling on the ball for too long, and is only just getting away with being closed down completely. So Foster has to come back as soon as he's fit, IMO. What has impressed me is the durability of the squad, in terms of fitness. Very few have picked up injury and that is testament to the medical team. They are clearly doing a great job in managing players through this tough period of fixtures. Important to win, but now it's over, it's on to Forest. We have to win that too. If we do, then finally we'll be second, if only for a few hours. 5 wins from 6 games. That's good in anyone's book, but we can't rest up. We have to keep on winning.
I wouldn't agree with this necessarily. Its all about the winning and season objectives. Which subs and when to make them is an opinion of an individual against another individual and wont matter if the results and any season objectives are positive and on track.
No manager is going to be perfect. As armchair managers, its only natural we will criticise subs from time to time as it isn't what we would do ourselves. I've seen Guardiola (and others) make subs I didn't agree with, and noticed their respective club forum members make the same 'subs puzzling' comments, but if they are doing a good job overall then no bother.
Done enough, job done! That was about a routine win as you can get. It was good to see Gray get on the score sheet and hopefully he can start to make a few more contributions in games now. Zinckernagel looked a lot better tonight’s he has speedy feet and is comfortable with the ball, the through ball was nice for the 2nd goal also. Baachmans distribution is very impressive that ball he pinged over the top for Sarr in the first half was very high quality.
Did he though? Neither Gray nor Deeney were fit enough to start a game until November. Perica was pretty much suspended or injured all the way through to the end of November. And Ivic obviously didn't feel we had the players to play his preferred formation of 4-3-3. It's not that much of a surprise that he played Sarr out of position upfront for the first couple of months alongside Pedro but I wouldn't say he was wasting him, more forced into it.
I think you have to use a bit of logic to asses the situation though. Gino appoints managers to solve specific problems, or as a reaction to a specific situation. Ivic was too defensive and the players didn’t like his strict attitude - Gino finds the cheapest available manager who is the exact opposite to a situation that wasn’t working, a happy clappy easy going bloke who was cheap and available. The fact that Munoz was appointed above a ton of more experienced and better qualified managers isn’t because Gino has some supernatural ability to look into a potential managers eyes and see if they’re cut out to be a top manager. It’s because he believes we have a good enough squad to get promoted regardless of who is in charge, and that the job of the manager is not as hard or as difficult as everyone else in football believes it to be. Munoz’s previous spell as a manger is far, far, far too small sample size for anybody, Gino included to draw any meaningful conclusions from about his ability. Therefore it is both possible to acknowledge he has done well as far as results, but equally it’s also completely fine to question a number of things that suggest he doesn’t know what he’s doing, because there is zero prior evidence to support the notion that he does, therefore it is logical for people to question if he does when he makes odd decisions, whether that’s strange subs, or picking the wrong players.
I can defend them quite easily - despite my defence of the Lazaar for Masina sub, I actually thought in terms of the contexts of the respective scores at the time they were better in terms of timing, the players he brought on and who he didn't bring off. He kept Hughes and Cleverley on, to at least protect the goal difference if we couldn't get a third goal, while still bringing on Perica to give Wycombe something else to think about. He also rotated Kiko with Ngakia, in an area, that for all Kiko's outstanding displays, we are looking thin in, and gave some useful minutes to Wilmot (a versatile player that many are saying should be played much more) and one of our youngsters, who put himself about nicely in an ideal game to try him out in. At no point did Wycombe look like turning the game round after he brought those players on so I'm not sure why you are criticising him on a night when we move closer to the automatics unless like a few others on here you just feel like criticising him at every available opportunity.
As I predicted, a colossal victory for the Golden Shower. Congratulations Andre on scoring two goals even Ikpeazu would struggle to miss but hopefully this gives him a boost now. Fingers crossed for Tom, I'm fearing the worst though. Good job we have our pick of over 35s to bring in this month to plug some gaps, thanks to Gino and Scott's collective brainfart during the whole month of January.
Celeverly ended up getting injured, why did Sarr stay on? Are you seriously suggesting we had to think about protecting our goal difference at home against the bottom team?? Is that the reasoning for making no attacking subs until the 83rd minute on Saturday, was Munoz trying to protect the goal difference then?
The first goal he deserves more credit than that. The second goal he will be grateful to Zinc for spotting him free from his marker for him to then slot it home.
Of course not, I'm with you that he didn't bring on enough attacking players and left it too late with the one attacking player he brought on. But even in games like this you have to be professional and at least see the game out in case you can't extend your lead without letting complacency creep in, maybe Munoz had the Derby game in mind when he arguably took too many key players off and too early, and it was just bad luck that Cleverley got injured.
Ideally I'd have taken off Sarr at least, but as we saw against Derby, 2-0 with 10 mins to go is not a done deal, and if it does come down to goal difference, we've got a slight advantage on Swansea but a fairly big deficit to make up on Brentford
Gray scoring 2 tap ins against a quite frankly horrendous Wycombe side doesn't make him a good player. Didn't look like our team needed to get out of second gear, Wycombe were frankly woeful and had nothing more than hit and hope. Good to get the win, but anything less than that would have been concerning.
His first goal wasn't a tap in. There is some skill involved to (i) keep up with play, (ii) make the right run into the box (iii) to create that bit of space in the box away from his marker to get the opportunity, (iv) then take it. All he was hoping for was the right delivery so well done Femenia.
Agree, Zinc showed some great touches and nobody else would have attempted or managed that perfect thru ball for the second goal. Actually tonight I was quite relaxed, probably for only the second time in a year.! What really stands out is we play some great football, played them off the park, but we've got to get some grip on our composure with the final ball, it's all a bit too frantic... And that's where Zinc comes in....
He was forced to take Cleverley off and Wilmot was the obvious replacement. Kiko has played a lot of minutes recently and Ngakia could do with some time on the pitch. Gray for Perica was a straight swap which was more than likely to give us fresh legs up top later on in the game. Why not give Hungbo a run out and his league debut when the game was won? Wycombe didn’t look like getting back into it and we looked the more likely team to score after those substitutions were made. I am not sure where the problem is?
Thanks Leigh Ann, give him a goodnight kiss from all of us on the forum please, he’s earned it tonight.
The quality at the top of League 1 seems a lot higher than it was last season, Wycombe on the basis of that display look like they wouldn't be anywhere near the promotion mix-up if they hadn't gone up. They won the play-off final with 24% possession, an early goal and a late penalty and seem to be a team primarily set up to frustrate teams and scrap for things, which isn't going to work at this level for the most part. Not knocking what was a tremendous achievement for a club their size, but the League 1 table was very tight at the time the league games were abandoned, and it's possible Oxford who were on a great run might have got automatic and Wycombe might not have even made the play-offs. I don't think they would ever get promoted to this level during a normal season.
Well done to Gray but lets hope it's not just a flash in the pan as we need him to keep scoring. As for the overall match I think that we should have boosted our GD tonight, but we failed to convert several good chances to score and that could end up costing us big time. I think it was a scrappy game with just a few moments of quality, some of which were provided by Zinckernagel who had a decent match. Kiko, Hughes, Serrialta and Cleverly put in a decent shift as well, and I thought Ekong had his best game for us so far. As others have said Sema is looking knackered and Sarr probably could do with a rest too. Bachmann is doing a reasonable job of standing in for Big ben, but I will be glad when Foster is back. Also Massina is doing better than a lot of people on here are giving him credit for, nothing spectacular but not as bad as some people are saying he has been. What is looking worrying is the possibility that Cleverly may be crocked, lets hope that is not the case because he really has been captain fantastic in recent weeks IMO. However if he is lets just hope and pray that Gosling is not still injured on Saturday. As for our MF crisis and should it continue I'm not sure who could step in, but we do have a few options amongst our full backs and CB's who could possibly do a job. If we juggled our defenders around and brought some of them into MF temporarily we could probably be OK. A win is a win, but I'm a little disappointed that we did not boost our GD tonight as I think we should have done so.
Gray scores 2 goals from 2 clear-cut chances created by 2 superb assists. If he had missed either of those he would have have been pilloried and quite rightly so. One swallow doesn't make a summer and 3 goals does not make a season for a striker. He will now need to repeat today's scoring efforts over a run of games to convince that he is worth his place in the team. It's a start but he has been prone to false dawns on previous occasions, coupled with a questionable attitude on and off the pitch at times. Let's wait and see what happens in the next few games against better teams before proclaiming him to be the new Goal Messiah.
