Beautiful

[FPT]

After providing the worst half of football under Rene Meulensteen, the Whites ground out a beautiful win with a beautiful strike showing beautiful spirit.

Some fringe players got some game time today with Duffers. Kasami was good today on his first start since Spurs, scoring with a pretty good free kick. Richardson looked ok.

In fact, the only problems today was Parker's passing ability and Sascha Riether's defensive ability, every time Nathan Redmond, a player I called for FFC to sign, had the ball, he looked like he was causing problems.



It will be interesting to see what happens when Dimitar Berbatov comes back in, the tempo has been fantastic going forward with Adel Taarabt as the point of our attack. Also, we definitely need a winger that is comfortable on both flanks this season, Duff, on the last year of his contract, is surely surplus?

The priority is defensively, which, barring Sascha Riether, was good. Although we conceded, we never really looked like it.



I'm not however, going to allow the win today excite me too much, Hull is going to be a difficult match. The best of the promoted sides in terms of recruitment, style and performance levels. A win, and we're looking up the table going into home games against West Ham and Sunderland sandwiching an FA Cup return to Carrow Road. A positive however is they're not scoring many; Robbie Brady is their top scorer on 4, 3 of which (I think) were penalties.

Their 352 could also play into our hands with Dejagah, Taarabt and Kacaniklic finding space behind wing backs Figueroa and Elmohamady.



Oh, and  :merry christmas:

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[Whitesideup]

Agree with your comment .. we didn't have the greatest of first halves. Neither Parker nor Sidwell were distributing the ball well, but they weren't alone. I think Redmond was excellent on the ball today and would have been a real handful for any right-back.

Just one little niggle was that at times we didn't even know how to take a throw-in and ended up just lumping it down the line, the best outcome being that someone would just nod it on ...and then it was easily picked up. But this was symptomatic of movement not being as quick and as urgent as it has been in previous games. We need that urgency back as Hull will be a harder test and we need to get something out of that game as well.