St Midden Roll Call Match Thread & Sh1te

[Don_Corleone]

We’re just not creative enough to play as we did.

We had McGinn, Stewart, GMS, Wilson and McLennan - they are some of the best creative players in our crappy league. There just seemed to be a lack of movement and aggression today. We also need to find some players further back who can play a decent pass forward to these guys in good positions. Against a St Mirren team who are absolutely dire we should've been just giving the ball to these players and telling them to run at their opponents. If they lose the ball we'd have it back within 20 seconds anyway.

We missed some good opportunities yesterday through McGinn, Cosgrove and even Stewart if I remember right.

Disappointing on so many levels, but mainly because it was an opportunity to close the gap with Rangers drawing and Celtic facing a tough game v Killie today - oh and the fact we were playing a team we should beat every day of the week.

[afc1903mad]

We had McGinn, Stewart, GMS, Wilson and McLennan - they are some of the best creative players in our crappy league. There just seemed to be a lack of movement and aggression today. We also need to find some players further back who can play a decent pass forward to these guys in good positions. Against a St Mirren team who are absolutely dire we should've been just giving the ball to these players and telling them to run at their opponents. If they lose the ball we'd have it back within 20 seconds anyway.

We missed some good opportunities yesterday through McGinn, Cosgrove and even Stewart if I remember right.

Disappointing on so many levels, but mainly because it was an opportunity to close the gap with Rangers drawing and Celtic facing a tough game v Killie today - oh and the fact we were playing a team we should beat every day of the week.

I fully agree with you.
We were poor, but still should have won the game.
McGinn’s miss is incredulous for a professional footballer.
That would have put us 2-1 up and St Mirren would have had to come out a bit leaving space for us to pick them off.

Why were we not creative enough, despite the players you mentioned?
Cosgrove had very little to work with and neither McGinn nor Stewart who played behind him were close enough in the first half.
You mentioned lack of movement and I believe it’s because we filled an already very limited space.
Playing a 3-4-2-1 formation when St Mirren were effectively a 5-4-1, meant there was little space to move and operate in.
After Hoban went off, we pushed on even more predominantly playing only 2 at the back with Gleeson as the shield.
This meant even less space.

The space was wide.
I was infuriated the amount of times Lewis pumped a long ball to Cosgrove, despite the likes of McLennan dropping wide and offering an out ball in space.

We should have played 4-2-3-1 and used the full backs with our wide men to overload them in the wide positions. That’s where the space was.

[RED_JOHN]

We had McGinn, Stewart, GMS, Wilson and McLennan - they are some of the best creative players in our crappy league. There just seemed to be a lack of movement and aggression today. We also need to find some players further back who can play a decent pass forward to these guys in good positions. Against a St Mirren team who are absolutely dire we should've been just giving the ball to these players and telling them to run at their opponents. If they lose the ball we'd have it back within 20 seconds anyway.

We missed some good opportunities yesterday through McGinn, Cosgrove and even Stewart if I remember right.

Disappointing on so many levels, but mainly because it was an opportunity to close the gap with Rangers drawing and Celtic facing a tough game v Killie today - oh and the fact we were playing a team we should beat every day of the week.

Our problem on how we play the way we do is that we rely on far too many defensive players to do attacking work. The team always consists of 7 defensive players first and 4 attacking players...the balance is wrong and that is why we are sore on the eye to watch far to often. Our defensive players cannot defend properly when under pressure anyway so maybe McInnes should remove a couple of them and add more attacking replacements. We might be better equipped for future matches.