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Ratings and reactions: Sunderland 2-2 Villa


limpid

Who was your man of the match?  

96 members have voted

  1. 1. Who was your man of the match?

    • Given
      1
    • Hutton
      0
    • Warnock
      6
    • Dunne
      1
    • Collins
      1
    • N'Zogbia
      3
    • Petrov
      45
    • Herd
      13
    • Bent
      0
    • Agbonlahor
      24
    • Heskey
      1
    • Albrighton (for N'Zogbia 87)
      1


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Foy got the foul on N'Zogbia wrong leading to Sunderland scoring, he got the Bent foul wrong when he was through on goal, he got the decision wrong to award the free kick leading to the second equaliser. Big decisions went against us today.

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Collins cost us yet again from a set piece, how can he let Sessegnon score from there? Disgusting. Bent with another huge miss, costing us dearly yet again. This club need to hire a mental coach ASAP, what a bunch of losers.

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warnock played well

dunne did well for most of the game

hutton got the ball in but had a new arse hole torn

given could do nothing

collins hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooof oh and be woefully out of position time after time

petrov, better delivery good goal

gabby good running and vision

bent some odd things got into position p-laced the ball keeper saved, great chance through gabby and bent work but hit it too close to keeper, but also decent save,on the hoooof break was never a foul on brown which would have left him another 1 on 1

nzogbia ? cant do anything without taking an extra touch, wont use his right foot and refuses to hit it with the outside of his foot, instead checks back every siongle time. he played better than most of his shit performances so far but seriously? first bloody time for once.

herd, looked decent in the middle as a blocker and play breaker, most of their good work went through sessingon who most of us wanted last winter

heskey? oh **** dear, his contribution today was an accidental collision with the keeper, he won some challenges and some headers but seriously you could put clark up there and we would look better

albrighton came on with 4 mins to go ?

tactics = shit as per normal

every **** week i hope we have been tricking teams into thinking we are crap and 1 dimensional, then kick off arrives and my hopes are dashed yet again.

formation is down to manager

players on the pitch down to manager

sorting certain players heads out is down to the manager

we play another shit team who are useless and we make them look good and drop points.

AM clueless and hopefully jobless before christmas

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You've got to say at times in the second half we actually looked quite decent and should have scored a second goal much sooner than we did (people can bemoan our general lack of creativity but Darren Bent really has to start putting away more chances than he's currently missing). Other positives include N'Zogbia looking lively, Petrov played well, and Herd looks like a prospect worth persisting with in a central midfield role.

The failure to defend set-pieces is unforgivable though because I thought this might be one of the few benefits of having McLeish in charge. If he can't do better than this from a defensive standpoint, it's a very depressing state of affairs.

Equally poor is the decision to keep Heskey on the pitch once he had reverted to 4-4-2 and push Agbonlahor up front. The amount of times in the second half we kept moving the ball to the left only for nobody to take the responsibility for puttinga cross in was a joke at this level. It's debatable how much Heskey offers at the best of times, but he can't contribute anything out wide and I can only summise that his brute force when defending set-plays (which seems laughable in and of itself) is the only reason McLeish doesn't withdraw him and the manager has to take a lot of blame for why we haven't won today.

Sunderland are incredibly poor and this match was there for the taking. McLeish's reluctance to switch to 4-4-2 with real conviction, which would have entailed putting a winger on the left rather than pushing Heskey out there, just demonstrates his conservatism and if you continually set up a team with this attitude, you don't deserve to win. Make no mistake, this was two points dropped, not a point gained.

Much like the QPR match, Villa just don't look capable of seeing out games where there is only a one goal margin. Conceding these late equalisers time and time again with no discernible evidence that anything is being done about it is a shocking indictment of the coaching at the club. There is no excuse for the smallest player on the pitch popping up in your own six yard box to head home an equaliser from a free-kick in the last minute of game you are winning. It has to be said that the lack of focus, organisation and resolve is suddenly looking no better than it was under Houllier.

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Funnily enough you can generally pinpoint the actual play where we will concede. However people acting like this late conceding from set pieces is somehow a new thing brought about by McLeish. Sadly not - it has been going on since the 2nd last year of MON's reign. Unfortunately no-one seems to know how to fix it because we go in front and all of a sudden put ourselves on the back foot and concede stupid fouls.

Still, I thought we were the better team 2nd half and this might be wishful thinking but I suspect if Bent had scored his shot from point blank we might have had the time to compose ourselves.

Just on Bent - if he is going to make a habit of missing those easy chances he can piss off in January. We may as well have Heskey up there blazing over the bar or into the keeper...

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A Few good things from that game, Nzog looked better, gabby looked class, Petrov what a goal,

Bad point is the defending at set pieces, I am sure Mcleash will get it right sooner rather than later with the defending, from what i made of the 2nd equaliser is that we are still doing Zonal marking( ala Last year) mark people up ffs it didn`t work last year and aint working this year.

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