*Long Post*

After putting some thought into yesterdays loss and other recent hammerings away from home I am laying the blame firmly with Alex Neil. I will try and explain.

We traveled yesterday to play against one of the better teams in our league, a team who generally does well at home so why did we have so many attacking players on the pitch? yes we all called for Pritchard to start but thinking about it could we afford Wes, Pritchard and murphy all on the pitch for a tough away game?

AN generally sticks with the 4-2-3-1 formation, this can be an attacking formation or tweaked to be more defensive depending on the players selected. If you play in the left wing role as Pritchard did yesterday then especially away from home he will be expected to track back and do the defensive side of the game. I'm sure we didn't sign Pritchard for his defensive talents and his workrate, we signed him to create and score goals.

I think AN should have been more pragmatic yesterday, rather than play 4 very attacking players leaving us exposed at the back maybe he should have stuck with Brady. I know he is not a crowd favorite at the moment but he is better than Pritchard defensively. The same for Naismith and Murphy. Jacob Murphy has been brilliant this season especially when he was scoring for fun but Naismith would have played slightly deeper?

We could and even should have played almost a 4-4-1-1 or a 4-5-1 let them come onto us and play on the break. Currently our full backs are getting exposed, our 2 central midfielders are getting dragged out of position and other teams have learnt very quickly how to get at us and cause us problems. Yes I want my team to attack especially at Carrow road so yes please go with Pritchard at home. No I don't want to go away from home and park the bus with 2 solid lines of 4 but I think AN should be more careful about the players we have and the jobs he is asking them to do.

We are also missing Jonny Howson and his box to box energy, Dorrans has played well this season but his pitch coverage isn't nowhere near Howsons.

Please feel free to agree or disagree, I also realize that individual errors cost us big time and the lack of desire for the last 30 minutes was disgraceful but I don't think we set up properly.

I hope my too many words make sense.

OTBC

Posted By: strap_on sally, Oct 30, 15:44:36