Having watched the highlights and couple of times now and

based on the games I've been to so far this season I think that MOTD analysis was fair enough really.

We look a good side but I think you always need to look at how you can do better and clearly the one very obvious area we are letting ourselves down is the marking from crosses and set pieces. Even the first goal is one that we really should be preventing with us having 4 players back and their one striker in the box.

I find this weakness quite strange really given that one of Neil's greatest strengths as a manager is the level of detail he goes into and his ability to organise the team but way, way too often for a premiership team opposition players are just completely unmarked when crosses come into out box. Too often both Martin and Bassong both seem to leave the striker for the other one to pick up and I struggle to work out at times if we are zonal marking or man marking.

I do wonder also if (and this is not another personal attack on Martin who (his one dodgy pass aside) was good on Saturday) there is a still an element of Martin initially having a full back's instinct at times and going towards the ball/near post to try and cut out the cross rather than making the sort of instinctive movements a centre half makes when a cross comes in from the other flank. Whatever it is if Neil can sort it out then we can clearly do even better than we are at the moment so hopefully he is on the case.

Ruddy also seemed obsessed with punching the ball on Saturday when on several occasions he could have caught it but he's been excellent of late so hopefully that was just a one off.

Posted By: Jim on September 28th 2015 at 12:03:43

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