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Boro V Wigan 1-0 (Assombalonga)


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The positives:

We won, Britt scored...

The negatives:

We looked disjointed, players lacking confidence and form, system still not right, were lucky not to concede.

 

Still 3 points though... Maybe the first brick of this season's foundations.

 

Another home game to come, a positive start against Millwall and it could start to look a little better... COULD

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We got 3 points, that's far more positive than anything else we've done this season. I said before the game I'd take a scrappy win and I'm delighted we did just that in the end. May not have crossed y

That's not a happy face.. That's just Karanka yelling at Downing very angrily, while Leo is calling for the stewards to come and get Aitor! ?

First win of the season, first clean sheet of the season and more importantly first win on a match day thread I've done, the curse is lifted! 

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It has to improve as we can't play Wigan every Tuesday night.

We all know that.

The game is over, points in the bag a sigh of relief but another team to face on Saturday and one that has caused us problems in the past even under TP.

Last night's result can not be allowed to be undone by a performance similar to last night, we will not get away with it.

 

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6 hours ago, Changing Times said:

We were able to beat what was in front of us last season as well.  I suppose I am waiting to see more and I didn't see anything tonight even though we won.  Like I say, the performance is the performance whoever is in charge but maybe that's a flawed way of looking at it, I don't know.

But most people are expecting mid table this season rather than promotion. My preference has always been results over style so I think I stomached Pulisball a lot longer than most until it became obvious that he needed to go. 

But I do see the merit in trying to play a more modern brand of football if we're going to finish outside of the playoffs either way. We've added some (promising) league one players for buttons but lost an (old) Prem player, a Danish international and a seasoned Championship CB so the quality is going to be worse. 

What we saw last night was a team desperate to get a result by hook or by crook. Hopefully that can boost the players confidence a bit and we can start to see some football like the first 135 minutes of the season! 

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Oh and just to let you know that Teddy decided to reprieve his original decision, as 6 year old often do, and due to his overall second half performance Ryan Shotton is still his favourite Boro player.

He does like Paddy and Johnny now so Ryan is walking a tightrope as far as Teddy is concerned.

He is fast becoming only too aware of what it is like being a Boro fan!

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The first half performance was as bad as anything I have witnessed from us in many years. Them defenders cannot pass out from defense. We're going concede a ridiculous number of soft goals if Woodgate keeps thinking they can. In the second half we looked far less error prone - though that was largely due to Wigan stepping up the pitch and pinning us into a defensive shape. Also the tactical switch to match Wigan's 3-5-2 seemed to give us far more organisation. That's the only thing I can give Woodgate credit for. I think that system suits our players far more. Best performers were Howson, Bola and Fletcher. Both CB's snd Browne were awful.

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if it wasn't the Boro I would have turned it off in the first 10 minutes, CB's who cant pass a ball 10m players trying to hit a perfect pass rather than pinging the ball around and the recipient not coming to meet the ball, though the few moments of quality in the game I thought belonged to Boro.
Still 3 pts and hopefully some much needed confidence

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8 hours ago, Changing Times said:

What does the length of time Woodgate has been in charge matter?  All I'm talking about is the performance tonight, that's it.  In my opinion it was no better than much of last season and actually worse so I'm confused why people would find much, if any, positivity in it?  What you seem to be saying here is that actually there was no difference but we'll be more positive because Woodgate's less experienced and our new Head Coach?  I don't see why we should judge the actual performances any differently to how we would last season though?  Surely the performance is the performance, whoever is in charge?  And it's not like I'm sticking up for Pulis here because I couldn't stand the way we played!

Because context matters.

Pulis had a decades worth of back catalogue to know that this was the best things got

Woodgate has 4 competitive matches and people are retaining some optimism that things will get better over time so are willing to cut him some slack when the performances aren't great early on.

That's my view anyway.

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The players are doing the exact opposite of last season in terms of shooting. Last season they were too shy of shooting and now they shoot too often. Wing shot when he could have put either fletcher or Britt through and fletcher had a very speculative shot when he could have passed and it would have been a tap in for Britt

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I'm not sold so much on the formation change being a long term goal yet. I think it was made partly to counter them and partly because I thought Bola went off with a bit of a knock, he started the second half with a bad foul on him and he looked quite groggy for a bit. It fit a purpose and fair play to Woody for that but early days on that front I think, I'd rather us play with 3 up front and try to get that to work for now.

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20 minutes ago, wilsoncgp said:

I'm not sold so much on the formation change being a long term goal yet. I think it was made partly to counter them and partly because I thought Bola went off with a bit of a knock, he started the second half with a bad foul on him and he looked quite groggy for a bit. It fit a purpose and fair play to Woody for that but early days on that front I think, I'd rather us play with 3 up front and try to get that to work for now.

Woody said post game that he made the change for tactical reasons. Burn was looking dangerous on the right hand side and had space so he went 3 at the back and put Marv back there to take away some of that space.

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In my opinion we simply cannot play the 4-3-3 system with the players we currently have. The 3 most important positions for this system and trying to play out from the back are the CB’s, Defensive Midfielder and the Wingers. All of which have huge question marks on the players occupying them and are nowhere near good enough. It’s painful to watch at the minute and the squad is so thin that I don’t see many solutions. 

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10 minutes ago, Brunners said:

I hope once fry is back it will alleviate it a bit and our passing out from the back formula is "pass it to fry and let him do it"

Unfortunately I don't think he will be an instant fix, is he even really a ball playing centre back or is he just that compared to the donkey's we currently have ?

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Absolutely dire performance. Just awful to watch. Far worse than a Pulis game, even, where at least it looked like we knew what we were doing, even if it was horribly defensive.  

This looked like kick and chase, playground nonsense at times.  Reliant on mistakes being made by Wigan under the press.  No real passing game.  And not even a reliable defense - we were lucky in extra time not to ship a goal or three.

I appreciate Woodgate is new to this - but after a couple of months as head coach I'd expect to at least be able to see what he's trying to do - but so far it's a more disorganised Pulis long ball game plus pressing, which isn't exactly inspiring.

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