Oh well, gone. I was experimenting with the look of the site, and the old (until very recently, current) look is no longer available. So I can’t switch it back. Hope this is alright for now.
August 19, 2008
Crockatt & Powell – photos!
Here. Lots of piccies of the new shop and a few of the old one.
Best bookshop in London. Crockatt is a Fulham S/T holder. You should go there!
Shape
For whatever it’s worth, here’s a comparison between the win at Reading last year and the defeat at Hull this year. These come from the increasingly impressive Telegraph football site, incidentally, and show where the players spent most of their time on the field. Somehow. Not sure how. Anyway.
In both games it’s fairly clear that Danny Murphy is playing behind three more advanced midfielders. So while we harp on (and we have been) about needing a holding player, Murphy has certainly been doing that to a degree. Against Reading Clint Dempsey (under the #26 shirt) played deeper too, but that’s probably anomalous.
Against West Brom Davies, Bullard and Gera were quite advanced, quite narrow, but equally attacking. From the site’s passing stats we see that Bullard and Paintsil exchanged passes a lot during the game, which says something about the width and energy that Paintsil brought to the team. At Reading last year Simon Davies played much more centrally and very close to Bullard. In both games the two forwards played close together, although it didn’t seem that way on Saturday.
I’m not sure what the message in all this is. Probably that we made a couple of mistakes and got punished, but otherwise set up and played alright. At Reading we scored at the right time (early) but turned the screw. At Hull we also scored early, but didn’t build on it. At Reading Shane Long headed wide in the first half when well placed; at Hull Geovanni scored. Football’s all about moments, sometimes they go your way, sometimes they don’t.
