More costly defensive woes as City return home pointless from Brizzle
More costly defensive woes as City return home pointless from Brizzle
More costly defensive woes as City return home pointless from Brizzle
15th March 2025 By Gary Gowers Leave a Comment
This losing streak is not much fun.
That said, and forgive me the terrible cliché, there have been games this season where City played poorly and won. And last night, they didn’t play poorly.
They defended poorly, granted, but the overall level of performance, mainly with the ball, was okay and should have been sufficient to win the game. The problems come when they don’t have the ball, and that needs to be fixed between now and the start of next season.
Let’s ignore Luke Chambers’ blue-tinged view on Sky Sports that it was comfortable and deserved for Bristol City. They were hanging on at the end. But they did hang on, and I guess that was the difference.
In the same situation, who would have put money on our city seeing that game out for the win?
More costly defensive woes as City return home pointless from Brizzle
More costly defensive woes as City return home pointless from Brizzle
15th March 2025 By Gary Gowers Leave a Comment
That said, and forgive me the terrible cliché, there have been games this season where City played poorly and won. And last night, they didn’t play poorly.
They defended poorly, granted, but the overall level of performance, mainly with the ball, was okay and should have been sufficient to win the game. The problems come when they don’t have the ball, and that needs to be fixed between now and the start of next season.
Let’s ignore Luke Chambers’ blue-tinged view on Sky Sports that it was comfortable and deserved for Bristol City. They were hanging on at the end. But they did hang on, and I guess that was the difference.
In the same situation, who would have put money on our city seeing that game out for the win?
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Again, therein lies the difference and why Johannes Hoff Thorup’s men will fall short of the playoff places.
Too brittle. Too fragile. Teams don’t have to work very hard to score against us.
And it’s not just our knack of screwing up the breaking of the press and offering up a chance to our opponents in front of goal (Exhibit B: Brizzle’s second goal).
Because Exhibit A was different.
A broken down move in our attacking third—courtesy of an over-hit pass by Shane Duffy that Emi Marcondes failed to control—was followed by two missed tackles from Jacob Sorensen and Callum Doyle, and then Jose Cordoba backing off and allowing Mark Sykes to take aim and score.
Or, to put it another way, a hot knife through butter.
Too easy. Far too easy.
Some have also tried to blame George Long—and maybe a token dive instead of being rooted to the spot would have improved the optics—but he was never saving that.
Ironically, Long’s best moment of the game came when he was forced to redeem himself with a fine close-range block, but only because his initial Hollywood save did the opposite of deflecting the ball away from goal.
Among the many problems that JHT is currently having to contend with is the goalkeeping issue. We appear to have keepers who are competent enough—most of the time—to make saves they are expected to, but rarely make those big matching-winning ones they have no right to.
