Win winning with a single goal

[H4usuallysitting]

And with say 20 minutes to go - how about introducing KMac.....he can sort out the defence, rarely loses the ball - and knows this league inside out..... I'd even put StefJo next to him for a bit of rough stuff......

[The Rational Fan]

West Brom swapped out a "defensive midfielder for a attacking midfielder", to counter than change maybe we should have swapped out an "attacking midfielder for a defensive midfielder".

[Jim©]

We won't win games to nil with Betts in goal I'm afraid. Throwing an average corner onto the head of an opposing player is non league stuff. It had nothing to do with them changing their players, we gifted it to them by a GK error. They had very very few chances in the game.

[toshes mate]

Someone should have been marking and muscling Austin away from danger before the corner was taken, IMO.  A little before the goal came WBA gave notice of intention to attack our left side with a well hit shot into the side netting.  We were really exposed for the first time in the game and seemed not to recover composure.  That is something for the defensive coaches to work on, but they may justifiably argue that failure to take chances at the other end is exposing us to unnecessary stress in the latter stages of games we should be winning comfortably.

Our defensive unit, as a whole, has a tendency to wilt (or appear to be much too fragile) under pressure and needs to be much more cohesive.  Opponents sniff out loss of composure with glee.  Harsh to blame the goalkeeper in isolation.  Lack of a defensive leader at the back perhaps, but should Bettinelli or someone else be doing the commanding in the box at set pieces?

[Dixie]

It feels like we've had a problem with defending a lead for some time now. I recall in the promotion season and before that, many games where we seemed to just sit back in the last 20 mins or so and almost invite the oppo to attack, particularly when we are in the lead (it even happened at Wembley).
I don't know why this is, but seems like there are two obvious causes:
1 - Players tiring... If the midfield are tiring, they are not making the runs that give the defence an easy pass out. This means that they have to resort to either playing it round the back 4 (and usually back to the keeper who has no choice but to lump forward at which point we almost always lose possession!)
2 - The opposition commit more players to a higher press - if they are losing then this would be logical and perhaps it coincides with our players tiring?

Slav often used to bring on an extra defender or a DM towards the end of a game, particularly when we were in front, but it always seemed to me that this resulted in us sitting deeper and thus putting ourselves under more pressure...

Feels like we have not been able to react to teams changing tactic for quite a while now