It’s so easy to become complacent. Thinking we’ve done it all before. Thinking that someone else will do it so it won’t matter if I don’t do it. Friends of Stratfield Brake will be doing their utmost to impose the will of the minority on the majority. We all need to show support for our football club yet again and go to https://planningregister.cherwell.gov.uk/Planning/Comment/24/00539/F and give our opinion. This is absolutely vital for our future, please pass the message on.
This was an ugly game. A hard watch. Being honest nowhere near value for money if looked on purely in term of how much entertainment was had. Certainly not “a game for the neutrals” but we’re not neutrals are we?
We support our team whatever. Even when we’ve been dire over the years many of us have still turned up knowing we would get angry with it all but also knowing that we would almost certainly be back again the following game be that home or away.
Even though this was a candidate for the most awful game of the season there are still huge positives to be taken. Compared to where we were two years ago we’re in dreamland. We were then 14th in L1 26 points behind leaders Plymouth and as we know it got worse before it got better.
We remain unbeaten in the nine league games played since Gary Rowett came in. This is another point on the board. With sixteen games to go we’re 10 points above the bottom three – and crazily only seven points off a play-off slot even though we’ve lost two more games than we’ve won. The team does not look like conceding many goals.
That said I still left at the final whistle quite disappointed. That’s down to the expectation and belief in the squad that has been slowly growing with Rowett’s arrival and the business we’ve been doing in the transfer window. Seems to me we’re building sensibly for the future. I’m feeling quietly optimistic; perhaps dangerously so. I never felt like we were underdogs for this fixture. I never like to tempt fate by stating “I think we’ll win” although sometimes I do have that feeling, but I usually keep quiet. I’m a bit more restrained with “I don’t think we’ll lose” which was my stance on this one. I also think there’s a very good chance that we won’t lose at Turf Moor on Tuesday (yes, I’ve gone and said it). Burnley are unbeaten at home and have only conceded four goals in their 14 home fixtures to date. They have though drawn five of their last eight games 0-0. Another goal-less draw perhaps?
So, we couldn’t beat NINE men. We often see headlines stating that TEN man team x hold team y? Such captions hint at heroics from the team that are a player, or players, short and failure of the side with superior numbers. What’s almost always forgotten is the detail. The second City dismissal came in the 86th minute and all we had were four added minutes. The added time deserves a whole FV to itself (I’ll come back to that later). There was hardly any football played in this tacked on time. Another subject worthy of deep and meaningful discussion. The straight red came in the 31st minute though, which gave us an hour with a man advantage but as we know it can be very hard to play against ten men. They dig in, defend for their lives by dropping deep and allow the opposition to have the ball in front of them whilst looking for the chance to very occasionally launch a counter attack.
I am though still somewhat disappointed that we weren’t able to secure the victory but on the evidence don’t think we deserved any more than a point.
Why was this such a horrible encounter? At the time I put it down to the way Bristol approached the game. Physical, dirty, cheating from the off. That surprised me because Liam Manning never got us playing like that when he was with us and as far as I am aware his current team have generally not been like that either.
After the event when passions have died down I can’t escape the fact that I and fellow United fans viewed proceedings through yellow tinted specs whilst the visitors did so through their red equivalents.
Often we see what we want to see and in a split second interpret a tackle in a particular way because that’s how we’re programmed as biased, dyed in the wool fans. We can’t shake that off. Later though I think I become more rational and objective particularly with the benefit of watching replays from differing angles which tell different stories. Which is the truth? Believe it or not at that juncture even I feel a lot of sympathy for referees. They get one look from one angle in real time.
My initial take on the incident which resulted in Joe Williams being sent off was that he had jumped dangerously at Will Vaulks with studs up whether he’d really caught him or not. The reaction of our players probably helped inform that opinion because we’re not a team that looks to be getting opponents carded. My son had it as a 50:50 decision. The Sky commentator commented “Not quite enough to be a red, but close”. Then referred to the “trailing right leg”. Having watched it back a number of times he did jump in but didn’t go in two feet studs up. He got the ball with his left foot then swiped Vaulks’s legs away with his right but I didn’t think that action was all that dangerous. A rather stupid challenge perhaps, but one that stated an intent to win the ball. A bit more than your standard yellow but was it really enough for an obvious red?
I remember Greg Leigh going flying in and winning a ball midriff height. A Bristol man went down. There’s me and others yelling, get up he won the ball. I’ve seen a picture which suggests it also could have been a red card.
I can’t remember what Ross McCrorie, City’s £2m signing from Aberdeen, got his first yellow card for but having watched the second back thought it was possibly a bit harsh but it was a stupid challenge when already on a yellow.
Right, after having said that at times I’m sympathetic towards referees, I’m going to have a real go at Oliver Langford for his appalling time management. Bristol were the biggest time wasting culprits to have come to the Kassam this season. “Game management” or whatever it is called had to be on their agenda once they were a man light, if not before. How can one blame them if they can get away with it? It was Langford’s job to take control and ensure an acceptable amount of game time actually took place. He did no such thing.
For Bristol throws one player would go over slowly to take it. Then throw the ball to another. That player in turn would toss the ball once more to a third member of the team. After a bit more hesitation play would start once again after what seemed like an eternity. I think that this was so blatant they must have thought they’d get a bit of a telling off so later reined it in a bit by only involving two players. Max O’Leary in the visitor’s goal held on to the ball longer than any keeper I can recall. Langford showed him a yellow card at 90+4. Wow, that’ll sort it out with no time left.
No time left? If one added minute in the first half after the red card and also the physio coming on was a bit of a joke, the four additional at the end 90 was a whole comedy show. We had all that blatant time wasting. We had seven subs come on. We had two goals.
It must be said though that we didn’t look much like getting a winner so even if the figure on the board had been 10 I don’t think it would have made any difference. We didn’t have it in us to press the numerical advantage home.
Unsurprisingly we had much more of the ball than they did and had more shots, 20, but only four were on target and we didn’t really work O’Leary.
As for quality football there wasn’t much to report. Siriki Dembele on the ball provides entertainment and never seems far away from making something happen to get us off our seats. It didn’t quite happen here though. Same can be said about Przemyslaw Placheta on the other flank. Quite early on after good work by him and Peter Kioso the cross was crying out to be buried but Mark Harris couldn’t quite get on the end of it. Should we expect more of him as a striker? He’s scored one goal since August. The way PP was shooting he didn’t look much like troubling the scoreboard either. Where are those goals going to come from?
In the second half Jamie Cumming had to pull off a good save when Mark Sykes hit a fine shot from distance. His best was yet to come.
After we’d kept players up following a dead ball delivery, Brown got a shot away but it was quite easily fielded by O’Leary.
It was though another defender who gave us the lead. That’s where our goal threat is at the moment. Greg Leigh is now our joint top league goal scorer with five. We’d been putting the pressure on and after a shot was charged down, the ball fell to Leigh on the left of the penalty area. He sliced across the ball keeping it low. It was a shot / attempt to get it into the danger zone. Both Rob Dickie, one of the many ex-United men we saw in the Bristol colours, and the keeper left it and into the net it went.
Much as I now trust our defence I’m always of the opinion at one up that we need another and so it proved.
We only held the lead for six minutes. We’ve recently started to give away silly free-kicks which lead to goals conceded and did so here. Michal Helik was the culprit this time, needlessly fouling half time sub Sinclair Armstrong. The Bristol number 30 was a handful with physical presence. He’s only 21 and has made just 11 starts for the club.
The free-kick was superbly worked. “Straight off the training ground” as the saying goes. It was taken from near the angle of the penalty area. All of our troops had been deployed inside said area. Bristol had two of their men over the ball and two others on the edge of the area. When executing the move, one ran over the ball, as you do, whilst the other side footed a square pass instead of putting the expected cross in. The closest player on the edge made a dummy run leaving the ball to travel to Sykes who finished with class from in the D with a right footer bent in. Cameron Brannagan was the only Oxford player positioned to block a shot and for a split second that dummy run distracted him but I think he was too far away anyway to be able to do anything about it. I’ll be sporting and applaud it. Pissed me off though, of course it did.
But I’ll conclude on a positive note. Some of those passes Brannagan was finding PP with early on wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Premier League. I love the fade he puts on the ball. And then there was that run he made at 1-1 to get back and prevent a likely goal following a Bristol breakaway after Helik, up for an attack, had received an elbow in the face. That was top determination. He’s got winner written all over him.
© Rage Online 1998 - 2025 All rights reserved. If you want to copy stuff, please quote the source
another fine mash from ox9encoding