[Archived] Rovers 0 Newcastle 3

[LDRover]

It was supposed to be 4-4-1-1 with Bentley in the "hole".

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From where I was sat there appeared to be quite a few "holes" out there, and I'm not talking black ones either.

[modes98]

I'm getting used to us outplaying the other teams and getting nothing!

Very annoyed that we played quite well and failed to get a goal or a point. But i spose that in the future we will play shocking and get the win.

I still feel emerton is the best right winger we have and bentley could have been used instead of moko with savage in the holding role, who didn't have to bad a game yesterday!

Goodbye to mr shearer, thank god he cant score against us in the premiership at ewood again. Just 1 more league game and maybe a cup game or 2!

[CAPT KAYOS]

Years ago I promised myself that I would never walk off a game - now within the last year I have walked off in disgust 3 times.

Yesterday ended up an embarrassment and worst of all very worrying - especially about Mark Hughes.

As I said in my earlier post - we had to go with 2 up front especially with their dodgy defence - which as we all know certainly didn't happen.

As mentioned by many, we huffed and we puffed and we where by far the better side - in fact Newcastle where just downright rubbish( the worst I have seen for many a year), however we did not create any chance/shot on goal worthy of mention aside from the freekick in the first half - so how the hell can Hughes and many on here say we created chances FFS?????????????????????

The promise is that we would be a more attacking side this season - and as far as I am concerned this has not happened - Hughes is lying.

What really galls me is that we can see it yet again as Fans, so why can't the friggin manager?

In addition, Souness will probably feel his tactics won them the game yesterday.

The game was there for the taking yet the starting line up was all wrong, and I don't even know where Bentley was supposed to be playing (don't think he did either).

Four games without a goal and Hughes is not worried - says it all really.

We have got big big big problems, and I don't think we can rectify them at present - there is a mindset of negativety that has set in and is reflected in our style of play or should I say lack of it which is all pointing towards relegation.

Alot of what many have been saying/dreading on here are now coming home to roost.

And just for the record - no I won't be there either on Wednesday either.

[John]

Souness said: "I thought it was a nervy affair, really, until we scored a goal. It was two teams aware of their situations.

"Confidence plays such a big part in football. Some people need a great deal, some people get by with not a lot - and I think it showed at times in our play.

"When we scored our goal we started to play with confidence and pass it around.

"The way Blackburn set out to play they don't open up and chase you, so it was a dogged affair early on.

"There won't be many teams that come here and win 3-0 the way they're set up to play. They are hard to break down and the players don't step out of position."

[Ninjathunder]

The most worrying aspect of yesterday's performance is that our inability to score is rubbing off on the players' confidence of getting a result and they don't believe we that we can score two goals to win a game once we go one down. We conceded one goal, heads went down and we shipped another two.

[G Somerset Rover]

Tooting Rover your spot on. I looked at last years fixtures and correct me if I'm wrong but it was probably against West Brom or Man City that we've come from one behind and equalised. On top of that again I stand to be corrected but under Hughes I'm pretty sure in a league game that we havnt yet come from behind to win. Talk about toothless and heads dropping.

[American]

I third that motion. I can think of about 5 times in the past 10 or so league fixtures that we've crumbled after letting the first one in (and that doesn't even count the 2 4-0 drubbings last season, pre-Admiral.

[Blueboy Downunder]

well folks me and aussie rover watched the game and i think that we both agreed that we have no idea where our goals are gonna come from. it certainly aint gonna be from a 4-5-1 formation....yesterday we dominated a game for over an hour but couldn't score...newcastle had 3 shots on goal and all went in. the difference between the two sides was that newcastle have players who know how to get shots on target (at the very least) and they have blokes who know how to score....we do not have any of the fore mentioned.

[Paul]

One point not raised about yesterday's game; I thought Souness showed respect to the club and players by staying on the pitch to shake hands at the end of the game. It would have been very easy for him to congratulate his own side and ignore the people he had worked with for 3-4 years.

[John]

When he is asked about Blackburn, Souness has always been very complementary about our club. He has very fond memories of his time here and he made some good friends along the way (and obviously enemies!).

Whatever your thoughts on him, he is an extremely honest man who is passionate about his football.

[Martin]

I was going to post yesterday but though I might say something too knee-jerky. So After a terrible nights sleep and watching the game again this time on telly, I feel a tad better.

The first 60 minutes we were the better team no question. Although we weren't exactly peppering their goal with free flowing attacking football, nevertheless we were on top. Shearer's goal changed all that.

Bellamy is going to struggle on his own - although his quality and pace was evident for all to see. He's our best player - I say build the team around him. It's a question of players to fit a system? or a system to fit the players? I tink the latter is more appropriate given the team we have.

There is no arguement that we are now pretty boring to watch. If it keeps us up I'll be happy. My fear is that we may be drawing our way to relegation quite literally. Let's face it we aren't going to win many as it stands.

At the moment I'd say look at West Ham, they see any team outside the top six and their thinking let's go win the game score 2,3,4 whatever it takes. Yes, they'll lose some but it's better to win one and lose 2 rather than draw 2 lose one.

I'm not expecting us to go to Old Trafford and score 3, even I'd be tempted to go 451 or whatever it is. However, come the time of the West Brom game we are going to need a victory and a good one at that. Something has to change.

Edited September 19, 2005 by Martin

[John]

You need to have good, attacking players with pace and who can beat a man to play West Ham's way.

[BRFC4EVA]

Imo, the turing point of the match was when the ref failed to send off Taylor earlier on whilst it was 0-0 when bellers skinned him down the right and he fouled for a second booking. If that had happened, souness would have had to swap 1 of his strikers for another defender and then really try and close out the 0-0.

However, i still dont how that finished 0-0. We played ok, no-one had a bad game and bellers ran the channels well. Didnt put the ball n the back of the net and that makes all the difference. Lets have less of the knee jerk reactions, if bellers had flicked his boot about 10 cm's the other way from the Neill(?) drive, eveything would be hunky-dory. Its not, so lets re-group and try to gain confidence by scoring a couple against htfc!

Somebody's gotta do the positive post

[Fife Rover]

The best I could hope for when I saw the formation was a 0-0 draw. I guess I wasn't prepared for how shockingly bad Newcastle were but that formation was never going to produce anything.

It might work with say, a John Hartson up front but Bellamy is never going to make much of punted balls from Neill at throat height. He made the most of a hard job but ultimately that wasn't much. I dispute the fact that we even played well for the first hour. We didn't create any noteworthy chances, there was no fluid passing. The first hour merely comprised of us punting the ball up the field and Newcastle heading it back.

Our formation and tactics need to change or we'll score about as many goals as Chelsea will let in this season and that might end up as single figures

Full strength team for Wednesday Mr. Hughes, 4-4-2 and the team should include Pedersen and Bentley in midfield and Bellamy and  Jansen up front. If that means dropping Savage or Reid or whoever so be it. We need to get some confidence in our attacking play quickly or we're completely doomed.

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This is just about the most sensible post so far on this thread. What the majority of posters  seem to have totally forgotten is how well Rovers played against Fulham ( a much better side than Newcastle were yesterday), and also against Spurs which we also deserved to win. When are you load of whinging defeatists going to get a grip and start actually supporting your players and management as I have done since 1946 and will NEVER CEASE TO DO SO. The vast majority of you on this site have seen nothing yet if you think that the present Rovers set-up is bad. You should try being a season ticket holder at Dunfermline for a while and you would soon be glad to get back to Rovers.

Edited September 19, 2005 by Fife Rover

[ace]

Lets have less of the knee jerk reactions, if bellers had flicked his boot about 10 cm's the other way from the Neill(?) drive, eveything would be hunky-dory. Its not, so lets re-group and try to gain confidence by scoring a couple against htfc! 

Somebody's gotta do the positive post

347973[/snapback]

Well said..Life's ALL about those extra few cms!

[den]

The LET seems to have caught the flavour of this m/b.

[Anti Euro Smiths Fan]

I'm not concerned about our lack of goals," says Mark Hughes.

A bit like the former commanding officer of the Titanic saying: "We're approaching an iceberg but there's nothing to be concerned about."

Well despite your insouciance Mr Hughes, I bloody well am concerned about our lack of goals and also the chronic lack of creativity in our midfield.

Forget the ice baths, forget the fancy modern technology Sparky. Concentrate on trying to get the players to actually learn how to pass a bloody football from A to B without making a pig's ear of it. Our passing and control of the ball yesterday was abysmal.

I don't share the view from some that we dominated the game for an hour. For me it was more a case of two crap teams, woeful in possession, who struggled to create anything of note until Lucas Neill's moment of madness gave Shearer an opportunity to score from a free-kick.

Does Lucas have rocks for brains? He first makes a stupid rash challenge that gets himself booked early in the game and then later clambers all over his marker to give away a totally unnecessary free-kick in a dangerous area. I thought Neill's distribution was poor (again) yesterday - but he was no different in that respect to the rest of the team.

Our midfield was shocking yesterday. Pedersen didn't get into the game at all. Reid is bloody inconsistent - he has a decent game followed by a dreadful one. Savage and Mokoena struggle to create anything.

The service that Bellamy got was pathetic - a 5ft 6in striker isolated on his own up front and we were reduced to launching aimless long high balls up to him. Hopeless.

Please get a grip Mr Hughes. You said that we were going to play more attractive football this season. It's now nearly six and a half hours (and four consecutive games) without a Premiership goal. We've only "achieved" this feat once before since the Premiership began in 1992.

Yesterday was the angriest I've felt about a defeat for quite some time. I thought it was our worst performance since losing 4-0 at the Bridge last November. I don't know how Sky came up with the fact that we created loads of chances during the match. I thought the team was pathetic and totally devoid of ideas and imagination.

I gather that our moustachioed new chairman Mr Williams occasionally reads the messages on this website. If you happen to be reading this Mr Williams, please could you pass on the following dictionary definitions to Mark Hughes when you next see him....

Excitement - noun. 1) the feeling of lively and cheerful joy. 2) the state of being emotionally aroused

Attractive - adjective. 1) pleasing to the eye or mind, charming. 2) having power to arouse interest.

We had precious little excitement and there was nothing remotely attractive about the match yesterday. Wretched performances such as this one aren't likely to pull in any more fans.

Our incumbent manager doesn't appear to know how to play expansive or attacking football.

The Hughes honeymoon is over as far as I'm concerned, Tris. We are back to square one, in the relegation zone - the position that Rovers were in a year ago when Hughes took over.

I could accept the odd game of crap football last season when Hughes had to shore up the defence and ensure Premiership safety. We scored just 32 league goals last season - the worst record in the Premiership.

We were told this season though that there would be more goals and excitement. It hasn't materialised so far, apart from the two wonder goals against Fulham. For the most part, we've looked like a team bereft of ideas and imagination.

We were told that our disciplinary record would improve this year. Well we've already had two sendings off and our captain banned after making a stupid headbutt. What a fine example our skipper set against Spurs. I'd personally like to see Sweeney Todd stripped of the captaincy and the armband given to Nelsen.

And I've seen enough of the big lump from Finland, Shefki Kuqi, to know that he's a million miles away from being Premiership class.

"He tries," say the Rovers optimists. Ashley Ward tried too. It still didn't make him a quality striker....

Kuqi doesn't seem to have the ability to trap a bag of cement. His first touch and control is just about the worst I've seen from a Premiership striker in years. Frankly I feel embarrassed whenever I see this useless lump of a Finn, with his big Roman nose, wearing the famous blue and white shirt and looking worse than a Sunday pub player.

We were promised more excitement. But instead we've had the same mediocrity and

a woeful lack of creativity in midfield.

Happy Anniversary Mark....

[Tyrone Shoelaces]

I must admit I agree with most of the content of the last post if not agreeing with the tone.

As for the people who advocate playing Savage in front of the back four, you're having a laugh, Savage isn't as quick, isn't as good in the tackle or in the air,and can't pass the ball any better than the Axe. Savage is not the player for that role, and when you look back to what Berkovic and Bohinen ( before he got injured) achieved in the more forward position, it makes you wonder what his position is.

As for saying we lost because the referee failed to send of a Toon player, we're really clutching at straws now.

[92er]

I also thought all 3 goals we conceded were poor. The Wall did not keep their shape. How could a small striker out jump two centre backs? And who was supposed to be marking the young striker for the third?

[Cheeky Sidders]

I haven't posted about yesterday's game until now as it has taken me until now to calm now.

The 4-5-1 experiment has failed. It stops us winning but doesn't stop us losing and it's monumentally tedious to sit through. For years I used to look forward to going to Ewood (even when times were tough and a defeat was a strong possibility) but these days it's becoming a chore.

We have players who are surviving by reputation alone. Some of Hughes' purchases have proved very perspicacious and in terms of their transfers fees it's hard to find fault with Nelsen and Mokoena. The real trouble lies with the ones that have cost us money. I had doubts about the wisdom of signing Savage (overpriced for his age and not exactly renowned for his club loyalty) and nothing I have seen to date has made me change my mind. He's a poor man's David Batty (at best) whose only discernable talent is for hitting the goalkeeper with free-kicks. I won't mention his corners as they're not worthy of comment.

I was one of the few who thought Bellamy was a bad buy (in my mind it was catastrophic) and while I realise it is early days for him, there was nothing about him yesterday that made me think he was any more likely to score than Kuqi, Jansen, Dickov or the ghost of Super Atko. The players who cost money have to be successes, plain and simple. The reservoir of cash isn't so deep these days and we simply can't afford flops.

I doubt I have little to add about Kuqi, except to say his "shot" (that most of us would stake our mortgages on a professional footballer at least hitting the target) nearly hit me. I sit on row 21.

Among the players Hughes inherited, Gresko is suffering from the same condition as Jansen as the player we once had has gone. Reid seems to have regressed to being bloody awful. Neill is, was and always will be a liability. One good game in ten does not make him worthy of a guaranteed start. And although Emerton didn't play yesterday he's still a workshy tart.

Finally, we come to the manager. I was ecstatic when Hughes was appointed and despite a slow start he steered us to safety by preventing our opponents from using their game to unravel us. Sadly, we haven't progressed or evolved and the others have rumbled us. The writing was on the wall for the 4-5-1 system towards the end of last season when we started letting goals in again and it will only work if the midfield do their jobs properly. The players look demotivated, devoid of ideas, they give up once we go behind and they seem collectively incaple of scoring against a team that is low on confidence, staffed by truly dire defenders and lying 19th in the Premier League.

If we are to persist with playing one striker like Bellamy up front on his own and rely on his pace, we have to play deeper and draw the opposition in and then play the ball AHEAD OF HIM so that he can use his pace against the opposition and exploit the open ground. Keeping up a pressure game and keeping the opposition penned in (as we did for a lot of the Newcastle game) does not allow the lone striker the space he needs and so he draws a blank. I've said already that I'm no fan of Bellamy either on or off the field, but he was starved of service yesterday and he had to drop back several times to go looking for the ball. By the time Kuqi and Jansen were brought on it was too late and the whole sorry exercise was akin to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. We could have played for another 30 minutes and Newcastle could have lost another player and we wouldn't have scored.

It seems to me that the manager, much to my regret, is out of his depth and he needs to learn how to swim very soon. Another season of grind awaits and I give thanks for the fact that Sunderland, WBA and Portsmouth are even worse than we are. Mind you, I'm dreading the Sunderland game as I can see the headlines now "Mighty Mackems record first win against ragged Rovers"... etc, etc.

It's a grim business, gentlemen.

[Scotty]

Jeez, some of the over-reactions on here are frightening.

[philipl]

Sidders. We played 4-4-1-1. The 'drog says that it was obvious so thee and me are blind.

Sparky was way too cautious on Saturday and thereby he saved his predeccesor's career. He hasn't put his career at risk yet but he is a misjudgement closer to it being so.

I watched the replay and yes we did have 21 attempts on goal to Newcastle's 4. The fact that 12 of them were rather weedy means we need Deano back to show the boys how to shoot....

or maybe not.

There must be a phrase for middle aged men seeking instant gratification from a life time's endeavour - ah yes, Blackburn Rovers supporter 2005/6.

[tchocky]

I think I hate football now.

At least I stayed in London and didnt spend loads of time and money getting to Blackburn as I had planned to. The little time we had in the UK was worth far more than the utter crap I got to watch at some "Half Way" pub in Camden.

The plan was to fly straight to Liverpool next time, and devote the whole weekend to Rovers, but I want to see a goal before any such booking is made..

[Rovermatt]

  Mind you, I'm dreading the Sunderland game as I can see the headlines now "Mighty Mackems record first win against ragged Rovers"... etc, etc.

It's a grim business, gentlemen.

348042[/snapback]

You heard it here first.

[philipl]

Incidentally, my step son is an Everton supporter- now imagine how they are feeling.

2-0 to the Arse HT (both Sol Campbell goals). Possession- a mere 68% in favour of Arsenal.