There are a lot of issues to take out of last night’s game, so let’s start with this one.
The three points weren’t delivered.
Once again, Ronny Deila has an alibi though; another red card and a missed penalty probably cost us, but ultimately we’re here today having drawn a match many (myself included) expected to win out of the park. And we were dreadful, yet again.
Our single goal came from the penalty spot.
The awarding of the second penalty was the only way, at that stage in the game, I could have seen us getting another.
That’s how bad we were.
The moment Boyata walked any chance of us playing attacking football went with it.
Not for the first time this season, I saw us go a man down and knew it was bad.
Yesterday I warned against tactical inflexibility; that’s how you go from beating a team 8-1 to barely having a shot on target.
They adapt, whereas you don’t.
We became even more predictable and negative when Boyata went off.
I’m frankly astonished at the way the manager threw the player under the bus last night; let’s get it straight,
Boyata wasn’t responsible for us dropping points.
We were a goal to the good, we could have chosen to play football instead of relieving possession and letting them have all the ball.
I also didn’t think it was a red card; in fact, I thought the decision and absolute shocker and I cannot believe Deila’s criticisms.
I blame the manager for the dropping of points, not the player.
If he possessed even an iota of imagination when we’re in a difficult match I would not feel as I do, but over and over and over again we see the same garbage, the same failures to adapt. We’re not getting better, and the longer we persist with these inflexible tactics – which had Scott Allan playing wide left when Patrick Roberts was available and to hand – the more we’ll suffer for it.
The team played with little or no imagination, and this was amplified in his decision to take off Commons when Boyata walked.
Nights like last night bring home to me that our worries about Deila are not related to single results or single bad performances.
We are all over the map with team selection and squad building, and our approach to games is predictable, all too predictable.
But the real worry is that we’ve shown staggering vulnerabilities when a man down.
If Sevco are really coming up next year, how do you think that will play out?
It’ll be another Year of Honest Mistakes.
One point out of three, but more than that was that it reinforced a lot of our concerns.
That was not a good night at the office.