BerlinWaller wrote:What Arthur does better than anyone is hold the ball up in the final third. He takes pressure of the defence and gets up higher up the pitch. Your comments are a bit 1980's sunday league coach.
100%. He's got some really useful skills that both of our recent managers have been able to see. Very dependable for getting hold of the ball and carrying it a bit. I think people get fooled by his kind of languid running style into thinking he's lazy, but that's not the case. Also played fine on Saturday - wasn't great by any stretch, but far from the worst offender. Upped it last night though.
Got to say, I thought the first half was an utter shambles! I thought the first half vs Peterborough was error strewn enough, but this was even worse. Was well and truly gobsmacked, genuinely looked like nobody had played football in a couple of months. Only ones to come out with their heads held high were Rawson and Love, and Gnahoua partly by virtue that he was only on the pitch for about 10/15 minutes by that point.
That said, last five minutes of that half were better, and we absolutely tore into into Vale for the first 10 minutes of the second half. Got the goal, and it then became a bit of a grind. Couple of scares initially but held out well in the end. Think we rode our luck a little at points but that's football - Peterborough were fortunate with all their goals on Saturday - and it's nice for things to sway a bit more in favour of us from time to time.
Love and Rawson superb all game at the back. Not the prettiest/most fluent of performances from Weir and Shaw but they worked incredibly hard, Shaw throwing himself at everything. Gnahoua also very good and made some important contributions. Can't really argue with Mayor for MOTM as he was excellent, although Love could have nicked it if not for the goal.