Yet he was key to our promotion 2 seasons ago. His captaincy down the stretch is almost offensively overlooked. Yes he was poor tonight and his star has undoubtedly fallen. But I'm not sure people are wrong for thinking he could have returned and found his feet again in terms of reaching that level. Would still far rather him than Bacuna.
Good summary. Thought Sarr looked better than he has done recently though, some green shoots there, a goal and what should have been an assist.
I'm pretty sure he was, as even though he wasn't actually off the pitch when the ball was played, he was behind the goalkeeper.
Me neither - I think @WatfordTalk summed it up well earlier in this thread. Very raw, but definitely something to work with and an exciting player in there for sure.
Should have been 5-1 Wallace was offside, Ken wasn't offside and Sarr should have scored when he hit the post
Sarr scores a goal and gets an assist and runs himself into the ground so he can barely stand up at the end. The geniuses on this forum "Sar woz crapp!!!" I give up, honestly.
The start of the game was very poor, just a lot of aimless possession, although we did look much more threatening as the game progressed. Little evidence of any patterns of play, more 'get it to our threatening forwards by hook or by crook', although I wonder how much of that is because we simply didn't have the players on the pitch to create chances otherwise (which rather does beg the question why Louza and Asprilla weren't in the starting XI). I like Porteous, think he's the pick of our defenders and could even improve, would like to think Hoedt just needs time to get up to speed tactically. Gaspar seemed more ambitious today too, played a part in the first goal and generally looked more threatening. Really on the fence about Bilic, wholly unconvinced about some of his actions, in particular his treatment of Asprilla, but a large part of that is because he has a very short-term outlook, which is unlikely to change any time soon under this ownership
He had a very good run of around 5/6 excellent performances in the promotion season. And that's it. That, plus 2 good showings next to Doucoure is pretty much the entirety of what he has to show for the last 5 years. Sorry, he's crap. I'd rather Ekong than Kabasele but I'd much rather neither.
Pre-VAR I don't think their offside for the second goal gets a mention tbf, didn't really think anything of it in real time and we were hardly haranguing the officials about it. Ken was offside, he had one outfielder behind him, but crucially he was in front of the goalie which often gets overlooked as it's taken for granted that the goalie will always be behind the attacker! Regardless of how we played, we did deserve the win, I thought it was quite interesting how we were significantly ahead on the xG even though their second goal was basically a tap-in
After a mediocre start to that season, he was colossal for us in the run-in, I was looking forward to seeing if he could replicate that in the Prem, but then we let him go on the cheap, where he's hardly played even under the manager for whom he was so impressive for that short period of time, it makes me think is there's something behind the scenes that we don't know about
Deeney. He had his faults to be sure, but a striker who scored 20+ goals for two seasons in a row? No brainer.
Not interested in digging up names, but I distinctly remember a number of people claiming "Chalobah is finished" for the majority of that season.
Quite right, but this happens seemingly in every game. We never get at the opposition from the start. It’s all so CAREFUL. Twenty-odd minutes of almost totally dominant possession and absolutely no goal threat. Then, when Gaspar puts a cross into the box, AS IF BY MAGIC, we score a goal. It really isn’t rocket science. The second half of course was just complete chaos from both teams. Fortunately, we came out on the right side of it all.
Sky showed an interesting chart early on in the match, which showed we'd missed the second most big chances in the league this season behind only Sheffield Utd. It was then amusing that it was immediately followed by Davis missing that one-on-one, but then us going on to score 3 goals! West Brom did gave us a bit of a helping hand with the goals we did score though. That game was pretty chaotic, with a real mixed bag of performances. What has happened to Bachmann on the ball since our last Champ season?! Porteous was excellent again. But Hoedt isn't that convincing when defending on the ground - he can be a bit clumsy and gets beaten too easily at times. Morris was caught out of position a few times defensively, allowing them to get in crosses, but overall he was good. Gaspar had a solid game. Kone and Choudhury were both guilty of being too slow with their passing again in the first half. Kone in particular wasted a few decent moments to put attacking players through but dwelt on the ball. He grew in to the game though and had a good second half until he got cramp. JP was back to having one of his anonymous, wasteful games. Sarr, typical not that good performance but popping up with a key moment (him dozily playing everyone onside for their corner was especially infuriating even for him though). Sema MotM obviously - he's been as much of a miss as anyone else. Rarely lets the team down when on the pitch. Davis - just can't score. He at least sometimes holds the ball up and makes a nuisance of himself, which is he why he stayed on the pitch so long. But it's bizarre watching him moan at his team-mates for not playing him on goal when he wastes the chances he gets. The Sky chart showed that we really needed to sign someone to stick the ball in the onion bag in January, so it's a shame we still have Davis as our clear first choice striker. As mediocre as he is, he's deservedly first choice as well given the lack of quality options we still have who we can trust in such tight games.
That was such a strange game. We’re really not convincing and I’ve seen nothing g from us to think we’ll make the playoffs. But we’ve just taken 4 points from West Brom and Burnley. A whisker away from taking all 6. I shouldn’t be too critical, but the last two results have masked some glaring issues. Bilic deserved every benefit of the doubt before around the Blackburn match. Now he should be judged. Results have been acceptable but performances have not. The second half was a shambles. West Brom quickly got on top and turned the game on its head. We were sitting ducks at 1-1 and just got lucky we didn’t concede again during that period. We go 2-1 up against the run of play, and even though we continued to miss sitters, we should have controlled the game with the players we had available to us from that moment on. We played kamikaze football. Bachmann is thick as mince. He just doesn’t get it. Brilliant shot stopper but is terrible at all other aspects of goalkeeping. Why pass around the back when being pressed. You’ve got to be pretty dumb if you cannot sense the danger in that. In the end we got away with it. West Brom were even more comical in their defending than us. It was the quality of a Sunday league match. Bilic has got to get us better drilled than this. No more excuses.
Quite sweet sitting on the train back to the West Midlands with loads of disappointed Baggies. This train journey would have been unbearable had we lost. Should have scored about 7 tonight we missed some absolute stinkers and on other nights we won’t get away with that.
And it's fair to say that assertion isn't massively unfair, looking at what followed. Unless he manages to reinvent himself, and realise he's no longer capable of pirouetting his way out of his own penalty area like he was at 17, he'll continue on his current downward trend. He'll likely get a couple more Championship moves due to his name and lingering reputation, making 10 unimpressive appearances a season due to injuries, before ending up at Derby/Charlton/MK Dons type club in League 1, or Belgium.
Screwed over by the officials once more. Their goal is offside but given. Our goal is onside but disallowed. Standard shafting from the ****s in black.
How do you make our goal onside from that screenshot? Ken is on the line, so in play. Needs two players between him and the goal to be onside. GK would usually be one of those but he’s clearly in front of Ken. WBA defender on the line is not the team’s second last player.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to him at all, but does anyone know if Ken Sema has a speech issue of some sort, or Tourette’s perhaps? I don’t know if I’ve seen him interviewed before - and maybe this is why - he did seem to struggle with some facial tics during his brief MOTM interview. If that is the case, fair play to him for doing it.
I don't even think the decision for their goal is that bad and certainly not one to go into the conspiracy box. You can understand the linesman trying to get up the pitch a bit expecting Bachmann to launch another howitzer through to their keeper/straight out of play. From the view he has, can't possibly say that's offside as it's pretty tight and the attacker would be obscured by Hoedt.
I wasn't aware of this until his Sky MOTM interview after the game, either, but he appears to have an incredibly strong stammer. Amazing to see him doing interviews like that, to be honest - extremely impressive, and I have to imagine would be an amazing thing to see for any younger fans suffering with similar speech issues (if that's the right kind of terminology).
Apparently there is another West Brom player standing on the byline also out of shot. So basically three players on the byline in total, meaning Ken was onside because he’s in line with their defence.
